About

Hard subjects, made learnable

Cheat Code Study is a growing library of study guides for the sciences that stop so many good students. Biochemistry comes first, with much more on the way.

I loved organic chemistry. I know how that sounds.

I loved it the way you love a hard hike: mostly in hindsight. I read every chapter twice before the lecture. I filled stacks of blank paper with the same structures, drawing them over and over until my hand knew them before my head did. Once, I studied organic chemistry for seventeen hours in a single day. I don't recommend it. My professor told me that to really learn this material you have to become a monk, and for a while, I more or less did.

It worked. More than once I walked out of an organic chemistry exam with a 100, which still feels a little ridiculous to write. Halfway through the course I was asked to become the campus tutor. I tutored organic chemistry for two years and added biochemistry after the first.

Where the guides came from

Tutoring is where I saw the real problem. Most of my students had never been shown how to study for a class like this. Nobody had a plan. They'd made it through organic chemistry on a curve, and a curved B-minus feels like understanding right up until biochemistry proves it wasn't. I told them the same thing every semester: the pain of failing this class is about the same as the pain of getting an A. It's going to hurt either way. You might as well get the A.

The first real biochemistry exam is usually on amino acids, and that's where I first got annoyed enough to build something. Every textbook, study guide and website I could find showed the twenty amino acids differently. Different orientations, different groupings, no two sources agreeing. So I stopped looking and rearranged them myself, into five blocks where every neighbor shares a feature. It was a small revelation, the kind that makes you wonder why it wasn't always done that way.

I won't forget watching it land. Students who'd been beaten up by organic chemistry, bracing for another semester of the same, would look at that grid and their faces would change. They could see the path, and they could see how quickly they could walk it.

Why I'm doing this

I spent a lot of nights searching online for something like this. I found lecture after lecture explaining the material in the same order, and not one showing a way to actually learn it.

I also spent more tutoring hours teaching students how to study than teaching chemistry: how to plan a week, how much time these courses really take (two honest hours a day for organic, at minimum), and why a flashcard app isn't a study plan. My standard line was that if Quizlet is a kayak, Anki is an aircraft carrier. Not one of my students had heard of Anki. That still hurts a little.

These guides are what I wish I'd had when I was teaching myself at home with a stack of blank paper. They're the system, without the seventeen-hour days. That's the only cheat code I believe in. It doesn't skip the work. It skips the years it took me to figure out how to do it.

What's next

Biochemistry comes first. Organic chemistry, cell biology, and anatomy and physiology come next, and maybe general chemistry and physics after that, one guide at a time.

One promise: I check every guide against standard textbook sources before it's released, and I leave out anything I can't support. Science has humbled me more than once. If you find a mistake, tell me, and I'll fix it.

Join the study list

We'll write when a new guide is ready. Nothing more than that.