The goal of this study was to determine whether students would be more successful in a traditional 15-week introductory college chemistry course or an intensive three-week version of the same course. In addition to course format, we also analyzed whether the students' academic experience (measured as the number of college credit hours taken by these students), life experience (measured as the number of years since the student graduated from high school), academic major (categorized as physical science, life science, or nonscience), and gender had an effect on their success in the class. The results of this study showed that, once corrected for student academic ability, students in the intensive course were more successful in this course than the students in the equivalent traditional course. However, we were unable to show that academic experience, life experience, academic major, or gender had any significant effect on student success in these courses. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)