Khan Academy proves helpful during finals season

With finals just around the corner, the season of cramming material from the fall semester is in full swing. As thick stacks of notes and assignments from every class pile up in the corner of our bedrooms, studying everything before final exams can seem like an impossible task.

The old fashioned way of handwriting flashcards and study guides has become a tiresome hassle. The advancement of technology has replaced those obsolete methods, as a new era of online learning has trended  among students.

With over 6,500 free instructional videos, Khan Academy makes studying before finals a bit more bearable.

In 2006, creator Sal Khan began to make online tutorials for various subjects, hoping to help his cousin who lived across the country. Today, the versatile site provides tutorials and practice questions for almost every math and science course offered at school, as well as other courses such as art history, cosmology and astronomy.

The videos are not only perfect for revisiting a forgotten lesson, but also for providing a thorough explanation of concepts with examples.

For us, Khan Academy is one of the first places we go to when we need clarification for something we learn in class. We find ourselves watching Khan explain various problems almost every week; using the problem sets, we practice identifying polyatomic ions for chemistry to graphing logarithmic functions for trigonometry.

In addition to helping us prepare for finals, Khan Academy contains a whole section devoted just to SATs and coding lessons.

Rather than spending thousands of dollars on SAT prep courses or draining money by buying thick college prep workbooks, Khan Academy provides a free and extremely useful platform for SAT practice. Connected with The College Board, Khan Academy allows users to practices problems that they may have missed on previous exams.

The site also provides reading comprehension and writing exercises tailored to replicate the ones seen on the official SAT.

Khan Academy also has an easily accessible interface, which is both educating and encouraging: it gives students badges and points for watching videos and doing practice exercises.

So this year, when we find ourselves surrounded by stacks of notes and assignments, Khan Academy is definitely going to be on our agendas.