Using Khan Academy for AP Chemistry
Khan Academy has a full AP Chemistry course that covers stoichiometry, equilibrium, thermodynamics, kinetics, acids and bases, and the lab skills section. It is free. It is structured around short videos followed by practice questions. The alignment with the College Board curriculum is reasonably tight, but it is not a complete replacement for a textbook or for actual exam practice. Go to khanacademy.org and search for AP Chemistry. You will see a course map with units broken into subtopics. Each unit has prerequisite skills listed at the top. Start there. The skills are the actual exercises. The videos are optional but useful if you need a second explanation. Do not watch every video before touching the problems. You will waste time. Watch the one video for a topic, then immediately do the practice set. If you miss half, go back to the video. If you score 70% or higher, move on. That is the working threshold. The course uses a mastery system with points and levels. Ignore the points. They mean nothing for the exam. Focus on the "mastery" checkpoints at the end of each unit. Those are closer to actual review material.
I ran into a specific issue last year when a student was preparing for the AP exam and kept getting stuck on the free-response section for chemical bonding. The Khan Academy practice questions cover VSEPR and bond polarity well, but they do not give you any actual FRQ writing practice. The platform only has multiple choice and fill-in-the-blank style items for that unit. I had the student supplement with past FRQs from the College Board website, specifically the 2019 and 2022 sets on bonding, and we worked through scoring guidelines together. Khan Academy alone would have left that student unprepared for how the exam actually asks you to justify your answers.
What the course actually covers
The AP Chem course on Khan Academy follows the 2024 Course and Exam Description structure. There are ten units. Units 1 through 4 cover the foundational material: moles, reactions, solutions, and types of reactions. Units 5 through 7 move into thermodynamics, kinetics, and equilibrium. Units 8 through 10 handle acids, topics in chemistry like the periodic trends and experimental design, and the final review section. The videos are generally clear and concise. The narration is calm, the animations are decent for molecular-level concepts like electron orbitals and collision theory. The pacing is steady. You can speed them up to 1.25x without losing comprehension. Most students do. The practice questions are where the course gets uneven. Some topics like molar mass calculations and balancing equations have dozens of well-constructed problems. Others, particularly the free-response simulation and the lab-based questions, are thin. The platform does not replicate the paper-and-pencil environment of the actual exam. You are clicking buttons, not writing out full sentences under time pressure.
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Here is a counter-intuitive point that most beginners miss: Khan Academy's equilibrium section treats Le Chatelier's principle mostly as a qualitative prediction tool. The College Board exam expects you to also connect equilibrium shifts to numerical changes in K and Q, and to explain those shifts using kinetic arguments. The Khan exercises do not push you hard enough on the Q versus K comparison. I noticed this when a student could correctly predict the direction of a shift but could not calculate the new equilibrium concentrations from a changed volume condition. I had them go to the OpenStax Chemistry textbook, chapter 13, and work the end-of-chapter problems on equilibrium calculations. That filled the gap. Another thing people overlook is that the Khan Academy acid-base section introduces pH and pOH early but delays the buffer and titration content until later units. If you are studying out of order because your class is moving fast, you might finish pH problems in week three and not see titration curves until week eight. This is fine if you follow the suggested sequence. It is a problem if you skip ahead and then get blindsided by a titration FRQ in February.
How to use it alongside your class
Use Khan Academy as a supplement, not a primary resource. Your textbook and teacher-led problems should come first. Khan is best used the evening after a topic is introduced in class, when you need additional practice before the unit test. It is also useful two weeks before the AP exam in May, when you need targeted review on weak areas. The diagnostics at the start of each unit are actually worth using. They tell you what you already know and what you do not. Skip them at your own risk. I have seen students breeze through the first few chapters of stoichiometry only to discover they do not understand limiting reactant problems, which shows up on the exam as one of the most heavily weighted single-topic areas. If you are using this during the school year, budget about 20 to 30 minutes per session, three times a week. Do not binge. The retention drops sharply after 45 minutes of video-based learning. Close the tab, do a set of actual practice problems from your textbook, and come back the next day.
Where it falls short
The biggest limitation is the lack of free-response practice. The AP exam has seven FRQs, each worth significant points, and Khan Academy gives you zero exposure to that format. You need to get past exams from the College Board. The 2013 through 2023 sets are publicly available. Work through them under timed conditions. Khan Academy cannot do this for you. A second limitation is that some of the video explanations gloss over the mathematical derivation. For example, the Arrhenius equation is presented with the formula and a couple of examples, but the logarithmic rearrangement that students need to solve for activation energy is not derived step by step. If you are the type who needs to see where the equation comes from, you will need to supplement with a resource like the Chemistry LibreTexts or a detailed YouTube lecture. A third issue is the occasional outdated terminology. A few of the older videos still use "dipole-dipole attraction" without clarifying that the more precise term on the current AP exam is "dipole-induced dipole" versus "hydrogen bonding" as distinct categories. The College Board is picky about this on the multiple-choice section. Pay attention to the exact phrasing in the question stems, and if a Khan video uses loose language, note it and move on.
Lab skills section
There is a dedicated section for experimental design and data analysis. It covers things like designing a calorimetry experiment, interpreting titration data, and calculating percent error. This is one of the more useful parts of the course because it directly maps to the lab-based FRQs. The exercises here are stronger than in most other sections. I recommend completing all of these before the exam. They are the closest the platform gets to the actual test format for the quantitative reasoning questions. One caveat: the lab section does not include photo or video demonstrations of actual procedures. It is entirely text and data-based. If you have never been in a chemistry lab, you may find the procedural questions abstract. Watching actual lab demos on the College Board website or in your classroom will ground the concepts better than the Khan exercises alone.
Final notes on timing
Start the course in September if you are taking AP Chem that year. Go through Units 1 through 4 by November. Finish Units 5 through 8 by March. Leave April and early May for practice exams and targeted review. This schedule gives you enough time to return to weak areas without rushing. Students who start in March tend to burn out or skip over material they do not fully understand. The course is free. There is no premium tier that adds significant value for AP Chemistry specifically. Khan Academy Plus exists but its benefits are more relevant for math and science at the middle school and high school general level. For AP Chem, the free version is sufficient. Do not pay for anything extra unless you want the offline access feature, which is only useful if you are traveling or have unreliable internet. The link to the course is directly on the Khan Academy homepage under the AP section. No download is needed. It runs in any modern browser. Mobile app support is functional but the interface is clunky on smaller screens, and typing out answers on a phone is frustrating for the longer calculation problems. Use a laptop or desktop when possible.
I have used this platform with roughly two dozen students over the past four years. The ones who got a 4 or 5 on the exam all did one thing consistently: they used Khan Academy for practice and review, and they used past FRQs for exam preparation. The ones who only did Khan Academy problems tended to score in the 3 range because they could handle multiple choice well but stumbled on the written response. Make sure you do not fall into that pattern. Supplement early, supplement often, and treat the free-response practice as non-negotiable.
