How do you take good notes in class?

Factual Questions
1

Borderline IMHO cuz it probably is subjective depending on the person, but…

I’m going back to school in January for my MBA and want to do better (learn more) than I have previously. I normally have only written basic notes with only a few major points involved in them. I find that even with shorthand and other short-cuts I still fall way behind what is being said NOW, and thus lose the train of thought or explanation. Basically, I find notes to be a distracting hinderance.

But does it have to be that way? Am I simply not approaching note-taking correctly? Are there certain guidelines for proper note-taking? Hints? Ideas?

-Tcat

2

Some people are just more efficient at listening to what’s being said as well as keeping track of what was just said long enough to write everything down. But as they say, a lecture is a process by which information is transferred from the professor’s notebook to the student’s notebook without passing through the minds of either.

If notes are really a hindrance for you, try not taking them. I’ve had some classes where I’m better off just listening to the prof and not writing anything down, and then taking notes at my own speed later on while reading the textbook.

3

Tomcat, would it help for you to buy a hand-held casette recorder and record the lectures? This would allow you to take more general notes less frequently throughout class, and then review at your leisure. Get a model that uses full-size audio casettes, and you can review in your car.

It helps to have a tape that you can stop, start, rewind, and fast forward when needed.

Also, when you do start classes, let your teachers know about your note-taking concerns. The teachers may have some written material on hand you can use as study aids – perhaps even their own personal notes to guide their own lectures.

4

Most universities should have classes on improving study skills. Perhaps you should check that out, and maybe get a few tips on writing essays and taking tests, too.

5

I’d also like to suggest getting a little hand-held casette recorder and bringing it to class. I’m more of a note-taker myself, but hearing the lectures on tape has helped a couple of my friends out a lot.

6

OK, those of you who do take notes…what do you do? Any websites that you can point me to? This is a small MBA program here in Prague, there will not be a study class.

[tech geek hat ON]
And those cassette recorder suggestions are soooo last century.
[tech geek hat OFF]

-Tcat

7

Tom

Focus more on getting down info about the content, rather than content, something I’ve just this instant decided to call “meta-notes”. What I mean by this is, get down enough info so that you can fill in blanks later, either by looking it up or asking the professor.

Not sure your major, but if the prof mentions an important term, or perhaps a historical event, and then mentions that there are 3 important points you need to know about this, make sure to write down at least the term/name of even (or something referential that could remind you of it in 2-3 words), and that there are 3 points to know. Of course try to get those 3 points down if you can, but if not no prob. You can always ask later.

Also, you MUST develop a system. Mine took years to develop. I used outline form labels (Roman numerals --> Caps --> Numbers etc.), but not as a consistent formal outline, rather just to show relative importance of points.

So if the prof said “Ok we’re beginning a new unit today”, I’d put a “I.” in the margin. It told me “big new unit comin’”. Never really used “II”. Wasn’t necessary to know whether it was the 2nd or 3rd unit. It was just a quick way to tell me that this is the big, and every thing under it was the little.

I did the same thing for smaller points.

I was always a textbook guy. So I just got down enough info so that I knew what to read about later on before the exam/paper/whatever.

Oh, and again I don’t know what your major is, but whatever it is there are usually a whole bunch of common terms that come up over and over again in any field of study. Develop shorthand symbols for all of them.

Also I put big brackets around any info that the prof introduces out of order. E.g.:

I. The Orchestra
-4 sections
A. Brass
B. Woodwinds
C. Strings
[Orchestra tunes to A440. Different in past]
D. Percussion.

When we get to the topic of how the orchestra tunes a few pages later, I might go back and put a little symbol on both this early page and the current one telling me that this info is linked.

Hope this helps.

8

The best thing you can do to increase the amount of understanding you acquire from a class is to prepare, and ask questions. This means that when the professor hands out a syllabus, you’re reading one day ahead. You should already have “the reading” done for the next day’s class, and have a piece of paper prepped for taking notes in advance, or at the very least understand what your notes will look like by the end of the class.

I’ll give a short example. In any class taught for the U.S. military’s ROTC program (and I suspect throughout U.S. DoD) there are “samples of behavior” on the syllabus. It says, simply, by the end of this lesson you should be able to “list the three types of …” or “explain the difference between …” etc. When I would go into an ROTC lecture, I would have these sentences (in the imperative tense) written out ahead of time. So my sheet would say:

Explain the difference between “delegating to” and “empowering” your followers.
(three blank lines)
List the three types of counter-value targets.
(and in this set of blank lines, the numbers 1, 2, and 3).

You can see where this is going. When the professor/Colonel answered one of those questions, I’d start scribbling notes in the space prepared. If the professor seemed to have covered a section, but not answered the question I’d written down, I would ask–as directly as I could–if I had missed the answer. For example, “Professor, have we moved past the difference between empowering and delegating?” By the end of class, if I didn’t have all of my blanks filled in, I’d go up to the front and ask the instructor if he had answered that, or if it was in the reading, or if we would be covering it the next day.

“But Jurph,” you say, “the government didn’t give me a list of topics we were supposed to cover!” No, but your professor should have. Use the syllabus as a top-level outline (if you don’t have a syllabus, outline the chapter on your own) and go one or two levels down through the chapter. For example, if the syllabus mentions “Day 3 - Revolutionary War: Reasons, Effects on Trade, and Outcomes” then your outline is pretty obvious.

Other places you can look for outline material include the chapter and paragraph headings in the text (yes, you should read ahead!), or even the first or topic sentence of each section in the text.

For mathematical or engineering courses, your notes usually focus on how to solve certain types of problems, so instead of chapter headings, you might use equation names (“Deriving Bernoulli’s Equations: Energy method”) or problem types (“Determine heat capacity of a convecting surface given rho, V, lambda, T, and Q-dot.”) If your professor follows the text, then it’s a good bet that he or she will do similar (or identical!) sample problems in class. Homework problems will often be close cousins to these sample problems, so you might even look a week ahead at the homework, so when the professor shows you how to derive C from D, you can ask “Hey, how do we derive D if all we have is C?” A good professor will show or tell you; a really good professor will laugh and say “that’s for you to figure out on the homework.” A bad professor will say “that’s not important,” and then put it on the exam.

Most classes fall somewhere in between these two extremes (problem-oriented and narrative-oriented) but you can adapt your note-taking style to fit the situation, as long as you’re prepared. I used this method on and off throughout college, and here’s what I noticed: it took a lot of discipline, I only used it when I thought I was in over my head, and it invariably resulted in me getting better grades. When I got cocky (because of my good grades!) and stopped using this method, I got C’s.

One last piece of advice, which will affect your grade in a college course. Sit as close to front-and-center as you can. In an auditorium, sit a few rows from the front (3d or 4th, max). Strive to be dead-center of the classroom every day, and as close to eye-level with the professor as possible. If you show up prepared and ask questions that show you know what’s going on, you may just be making your own luck for later–if you flub a mid-term or final, the instructor (who knows your face and probably your name by now) is more likely to give you a chance to do extra credit.

You may also luck out: I went to ask about my semester-end grade in Thermo, and the professor looked up my name in his grade-book, and said (I’ll paraphrase) “Your midterms were solid. Your homeworks were not perfect, but better than average. You always knew what was happening in class. I bet you know what you did wrong on the final already. I think the final unfairly penalizes you for a bad day. You are no C student. I can’t make you an A student with this grade, but I think you have earned a B+. Does that sound fair?”

It works.

9

Everyone learns differently, of course, so it’s hard to know. Personally, I have used several different note-taking methods successfully.

I find that if I am understanding the material easily or I am already familiar with it, I can take standard notes, summarising what the prof is saying.

If the material is difficult or unfamiliar because I have decided not to do the reading, I find it useful to take a laptop to class and take down the professor’s lecture verbatim. On several occassions I have ended up with a set of notes that is far better than my textbook, which I can then dispense with while preparing for the exam. Of course, you have to be a good typist to be able to do this.

10

Let’s start by inverting the normal assumption: to wit, your default activity is to take no notes. Listen to the lecture.

Now vary that (in other words, write stuff down) when, and only when

• A detail list is presented. Days later, with no notes, you’d remember that in Auto Mechanics 101 the instructor spoke at some length about the role of piston rings, and you don’t need notes on that any more than you need notes on an interesting conversation you had with your friends at lunch, but when the instructor started listing the different available competing types of piston rings and their advantages and disadvantages, that’s detail. You have your chrome rings and you have your moly rings and you have stainless steel. This one is hard and wears in slow but lasts a long long time; this one on the other hand seats very effectively even if there are imperfections so you’re less likely to have compression leak. You don’t write down all that like I did, you jot down just enough to fill in the details, because you’ll remember the context so you don’t need long blabby sentences:

• Proper names and Specifics. You’ll need no notes in Astronomy 101 when the professor explains that a star of a certain mass or more will compress tight enough when it has run out of Helium to fuse to cause it to start fusing the next element, while lighter stars don’t sqwunch down enough. You’ll remember that concept. Unless you’ve got a better built-in name-rememberer in your brain, though, you’ll want to jot down that the name of this limit is “Chandrasekhar’s limit”, and you might want to jot down the consecutive order of elements that a star attempts to fuse. Your notes:

• You’ve got a jackass for a professor. By which I mean that the professor tests not on your comprehension of the subject taught but on the extent to which you are prepared to parrot back certain learned-by-rote phrases which have been emphasized in class. I had an elementary school teacher who administered a test containing the fill-in-the-blanks question “Continents are shaped like _____” and the “correct” answer was “triangles”. You’ll still encounter this kind of horseshit in college occasionally. Your notes:

11

I just write what I hear, and Im able to get pretty much everything down. I just make a point of underlining subjects, and use a dash and bullet sort of outline format.

I also make a point of having spaces, just to break it up visually, which helps me, since I’m very visual.

I am, however, lucky enough to have profs that have overheads or, in one case, actually still use the blackboard almost exclusively, so there is plenty of time to write the notes down. These profs get the best student reviews, too!

12

What used to work for me back in the dark ages was to jot down what I thought were critical points or relationships throughout the lecture. At the end of the day, I would transfer my rather cryptic notes to a clean notebook dedicated to that class (a computer file today), expand on them to where there was no mystery, and flesh them out with additional information as necessary.

The acts of transcribing and fleshing out reinforced the information and became de facto study sessions. Later on, near test time, I didn’t have to decipher my scribbles or try to figure out what the hell I meant to say.

13

Try different methods and see which works for you. Usually different classes require different methods of taking notes. One method is the Cornell Method, which can work really well for some subjects. You basically just write a topic on the left side of your page and then write the details on the right side.

To remember more, it really helps to rewrite your notes later that day. That way, when you take notes you can write down general ideas if you’re rushed and then later you’ll have time to look up the topic and learn the details.

14

The perfect note taking system for me turned out to consist of the following:

  1. During the lecture I would sort of listen to what was being said, but mostly concentrated on what the instructor was writing on the board (or projecting on the screen, as the case may be). If I didn’t hear something it didn’t matter, I just wrote down everything the instructor wrote. I also had a microcasette recorder running - this WAS cutting edge technology in the mid 80s.

  2. When I had time over the next few days I would go back through my notes while listening to the tape. I would take this time to fill in all the blanks, literal and figurative. I would make sure at this point that every single thing the instructor had said was now in my notebook, and was properly related to the notes I had taken in class. I would rewind and relisten as necessary to get difficult concepts or things that were otherwise unclear.

  3. When exams came, it was at least the third time through the material as others have said above. I wasn’t trying to learn it for the first time, I was reinforcing what was already in my brain.

This method made a huge difference for me and my grades reflected it…I sometimes wish I had figured it out earlier.

15

I’ll echo Moe. My 7th grade history teacher stressed teaching us to take notes in outline form, and it proved to be adaptable to most subjects. It served me well throughout HS and college.

16

It depends on the subject how much notes you really need - in a history class it would be less than in chemistry, I guess.

As for developing a note-taking system, in addition to Moe´s suggestions, you could have a look at how note-taking in consecutive interpreting works. (I couldn´t find a link with examples right now, but try googling *consecutive * and note taking.)

It´s all about structure and symbols. e.g. I use a square for country, up and down arrows for increasing and decreasing, a dollar symbol for money, “ec” for economy, a circle for world, a stylized chimney stack Í for industry (think old-fashioned factory), a stylized stick figure for person, an X for war etc. Once you have developed symbols that make sense to you (and are appropriate to the subject you are taking), these can be combined very easily.
eg. X with a little blob for a head is soldier, my person symbol inside a circle is world population, and a sentence such as “The role of the industrialized countries in world economy is growing ever more important” becomes a square with an Í in it, then “in” then a circle with “ec” in it and an upwards arrow.

These symbols are very individual, you have to find (or invent) symbols that make sense to you. As they are slightly ambiguous, however, they are no use if you need to write down an exact quote.
But they serve as a short-time memory support, you can concentrate on the class and transcribe your notes to plain text after class. Maybe it works for you.

17

This is another method by Tony Buzan called Mind Mapping
Instead of making a “linear” set of notes, this system uses diagrams. For instance a subject is placed in a box in the centre of the page i.e. JP4 Fuel System and branching out from it the different components, sensor temperatures, fuel distribution etc etc. The above link explains it more clearly I hope, but there is a book.
It’s quite an unusual approach, but it does suit some people.

V

18

Pushed the wrong button again. I meant to say click on the top link at the bottom of the page to see an example of the system

V