Decks checked: October 2026
There is no dominant organic chemistry Anki deck. For the MCAT, use the AnKing MCAT deck or Sketchy's free 200-card orgo deck. For the DAT, DAT Bootcamp's free reaction deck is the place to start. For a university Orgo 1 or Orgo 2 course, the shared decks are small and follow someone else's syllabus, so building cards from your own lecture slides usually works better.
Organic chemistry has a reputation as the course that ends pre-med plans, and a lot of that comes from volume. By the end of Orgo 2 you are expected to know a long list of reactions, their reagents, their stereochemistry and where each one fits in a synthesis. Students who try to hold all of that in their heads the week before the final usually find they can't. Spaced repetition is a good fit for the memory part of orgo. The problem is finding a deck that matches your course.
The AnKing MCAT deck on AnkiHub is a collaborative deck built from earlier community decks, including MileDown's, and is tagged by UWorld question IDs so you can add the cards behind each question you miss. It covers all MCAT subjects, so organic chemistry is one section of it. It needs an AnkiHub membership and gets weekly updates. Our Anki deck for the MCAT page compares it with the other MCAT decks.
Sketchy's organic chemistry Anki deck is 200 MCAT-focused cards, free in exchange for your email. It follows the AAMC content outline in three parts: general principles (nomenclature, isomers, mechanisms), reactions (functional groups, oxidation and reduction, carbonyl chemistry, amino acid synthesis) and compound analysis (spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, separations). Cards include Sketchy's own illustrations and work with the AnKing note types. At 200 cards it is a high-yield summary for the MCAT, not a course deck.
DAT Bootcamp's Organic Chemistry Reaction Cheat Sheet deck is a free reaction deck shared through Google Drive, built around Dr. Mike's Organic Chemistry Review videos. The post doesn't give a card count. It suits DAT candidates who are already using DAT Bootcamp, and it works as a reaction review for anyone else. For deck settings during DAT prep, see our Anki settings for the DAT guide.
Students have shared decks from their own orgo courses, but they are small and old. Two examples:
If your course uses Klein, the first deck is a reasonable starting skeleton. Otherwise, treat these as examples of card design rather than decks to study.
| Deck | Size | Built for | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| AnKing MCAT deck | Whole MCAT (orgo is one section) | MCAT | AnkiHub membership |
| Sketchy MCAT orgo deck | 200 cards | MCAT | Free (email) |
| DAT Bootcamp reaction deck | Not published | DAT | Free |
| Organic Chem Rxns Semester 1 & 2 | 71 notes | A course using Klein | Free |
| Organic chemistry mechanisms | 27 notes | Basic mechanisms | Free |
Sizes from AnkiWeb and the publishers' pages, checked October 2026.
For the MCAT and DAT, start with a pre-made deck. Both exams test a defined outline, and the decks above are built for it.
For a college course, the honest answer is different. Orgo courses vary a lot: the textbook, the order of chapters, which named reactions your professor cares about, whether spectroscopy is a whole unit or a week. The shared course decks have tens of cards, not hundreds, and follow one school's syllabus. Your exam is written from your lecture slides and problem sets, so those are what your cards should come from. Build cards for each lecture the week you see it, and keep earlier chapters in review so they are still there for the cumulative final.
Most bad orgo cards try to fit a whole reaction onto one card. Split each reaction into small, testable pieces:
Use drawn structures (a screenshot from your slides or a structure drawing tool) instead of IUPAC names. Recognizing a structure on a page is the skill the exam tests.
Anki will make you fast at recalling what a reagent does. It won't teach you to solve a multi-step synthesis or explain why a reaction goes the way it does. Those come from working problems by hand, ideally with an answer key you check line by line. A sensible weekly split for most students is short daily Anki sessions for reagents and facts, and the bulk of your study time on problem sets. Retrieval practice research supports both: testing yourself beats rereading, and practice problems are the most realistic form of testing for orgo. Our spaced repetition statistics page summarizes the evidence.
Fifteen to twenty-five new cards a day is enough to keep up with a typical orgo lecture pace. Turn on FSRS, tag cards by chapter so you can build a filtered deck before each exam, and don't suspend old chapters after the midterm: the final is cumulative and Orgo 2 assumes Orgo 1. The Anki settings guide explains the options.
Related guides: Anki decks for biochemistry, Anki decks for biology and Anki decks for the MCAT. For every subject we cover, see the Anki decks guide.
Organic chemistry is where the gap between shared decks and your course is widest, which is the gap StudyCards AI is built for. Upload your orgo lecture slides as a PDF and get question and cloze cards for the reagents, reaction outcomes, conditions and spectroscopy values in them, ready to download as an Anki .apkg file. It works from the text in your slides, so add structure images to the reaction cards yourself and check every generated card against your notes. Our post on AI flashcards for organic chemistry covers that workflow in more detail.
Try StudyCards AI FreeIt depends on the exam. For the MCAT, use the AnKing MCAT deck or Sketchy's free 200-card organic chemistry deck. For the DAT, DAT Bootcamp's free reaction deck is a good start. For a university Orgo 1 or Orgo 2 course, no shared deck matches your syllabus, so most students do best building cards from their own lecture slides.
Anki is good for the parts of organic chemistry that are memory: reagents, reaction outcomes, functional groups, named reactions and spectroscopy values. It is not a replacement for working practice problems and drawing mechanisms by hand, which is what most orgo exams ask you to do.
Make three cards per reaction: starting material plus reagents to product, product to the reagents that made it, and one card for the key detail such as regiochemistry or stereochemistry. Use images of structures, not written names, because exams show you drawings.
Yes. Sketchy gives away a 200-card MCAT organic chemistry deck by email, and DAT Bootcamp shares a free Organic Chemistry Reaction Cheat Sheet deck via Google Drive. Several small course decks are also free on AnkiWeb.
Yes. Orgo 2 adds many more reactions (carbonyl chemistry, aromatic substitution, amines), so the memorization load is higher than Orgo 1. Keep reviewing your Orgo 1 cards too, since Orgo 2 reactions build on them.
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