Ask ten HSC candidates what they find hardest in Chemistry 2nd paper and nine of them will say organic. Ask them why, and the answer is always the same: too many reactions to remember.

The premise of this course is that the remembering is a symptom, not the disease. There are roughly forty named reactions in the HSC organic syllabus, and about six ideas underneath all of them. Learn the six and the forty stop being a list you lose by November.

What you will learn

The course rebuilds organic chemistry around electron movement. Everything is derived from where electron density sits and where it wants to go, which means the same reasoning covers reactions you have never seen before, including the ones admission tests like to invent.

• IUPAC naming for every functional class, including the multi-substituent cases boards genuinely set

• Hybridisation and geometry, so you can say why an alkyne is linear and an amide is flat

• Isomerism in full, ending with optical activity and R and S assignment

• Inductive, mesomeric, hyperconjugative and steric effects, used to rank acidity and basicity on sight

• SN1, SN2, E1 and E2, the four mechanisms most conversion questions are quietly built from

• Electrophilic addition, Markovnikov and anti-Markovnikov products, and carbocation rearrangement

• Aromaticity and the complete electrophilic substitution set, with directing effects

• Carbonyl chemistry: nucleophilic addition, aldol, Cannizzaro and the haloform test

• Grignard routes, which are the workhorse of conversion answers

• Distinguishing tests, phrased the way the practical viva expects to hear them

Every mechanism is drawn with curly arrows and every arrow obeys one rule: it starts at electrons and ends where those electrons go. By week four you are drawing them yourself, live, on the shared board, in front of the batch. That part is uncomfortable and it is the part that works.

How the course runs

Twelve weeks. Two live classes a week, Sunday and Thursday, 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm, plus a Friday problem clinic that is optional on paper and rarely empty in practice.

The sequence is fixed, because each week is built on the one before it:

1. Weeks 1 and 2: structure, hybridisation, nomenclature and isomerism.

2. Weeks 3 and 4: electronic effects, intermediate stability, acidity and basicity.

3. Weeks 5 and 6: aliphatic substitution and elimination, with stereochemistry.

4. Weeks 7 and 8: alkenes, alkynes and addition chemistry.

5. Weeks 9 and 10: aromatic chemistry and directing effects.

6. Weeks 11 and 12: carbonyls, acids, amines, and the full conversion map.

The conversion map is what you actually leave with. One A3 sheet, extended a little every week, connecting every functional group in the syllabus to every other by the shortest route. Students who keep it end up answering conversion questions from memory of the sheet rather than memory of the reactions.

Who should take it

Class 12 students working through 2nd paper alongside college, who want organic finished properly before the pre-test rather than crammed after it.

Admission candidates are the other half of the batch. Medical and university admission MCQs lean heavily on organic, and they punish exactly the memorisation approach that scrapes a board A+, so the weekly quizzes carry a block of admission-level questions from week three onward.

It is not a chemistry course from zero. If atomic structure, bonding and periodic trends from 1st paper are still shaky, do those first, otherwise electronic effects in week three will feel arbitrary and the rest of the course rests on them.

Assessment and practice

A 20-question MCQ quiz every Saturday on the week just finished, auto-marked, with a worked explanation attached to each wrong answer rather than a bare correct option.

Three creative-question tests at weeks 4, 8 and 12, hand-marked, where mechanism arrows carry marks of their own. A correct product with no reasoning does not score full marks here, for the same reason it does not in the board script.

The course closes with a 100-mark model test on the entire organic portion, timed and ranked, followed by a two-hour solve session where the six most-missed questions are worked through in detail.

Support between classes

Questions go into the course Q&A thread and are answered within a working day, usually the same evening. Photographs of your handwritten mechanisms are welcome and are the fastest way to get a real answer, because the error is nearly always in an arrow rather than in the idea.

I had learnt aldol and Cannizzaro three times before and forgotten both. Drawing the mechanism myself in class was the first time it stayed. In the model test I got the conversion question fully right for the first time.

Nusrat J., HSC 2025 candidate, Chattogram

Practical details

Classes start on 20 January 2026 and the twelve weeks close in mid-April, which leaves organic finished well before the college pre-test. The fee is ৳4,200 and may be split across up to three instalments. There is no seat limit, so nobody is turned away to wait for a later start.

All classes are recorded and stay available until the HSC exam of your year, so the course doubles as a revision archive during the study leave, when nobody is running live classes anyway.