Students who don't take notes

In My Humble Opinion
1

Of course I ask this question after it’s completely irrelevant to me. (That’s a lie, there’s always grad school!)

For the vast majority of college, I didn’t take many notes. It had nothing to do with laziness, seriously. At first I would try to take as many notes as possible, and over time I wrote less and less until eventually I just stopped getting out my note taking implements altogether (for most classes).

The reason? I did a lot better when I didn’t take notes. I felt that I absorbed the material better. I made an effort to be engaged and pay attention, answer and ask questions in class (within reason, obviously), and focus on the material being presented rather than on writing it down.

Now, it wasn’t a huge increase in grade quality, we’re not even talking between letter grades, we’re talking maybe a few percentage points at best. But I found that after I stopped taking notes I retained material for longer after classes were over, and had to study less for tests. And on top of that, I felt much less stress during tests and felt I could apply the concepts better. There was a bit of a tradeoff, admittedly, in the time it took to do homework, since I didn’t have examples done in class written down and often had to rely on the (often incomplete) instructor’s notes and slides online, but that’s okay. I also had more trouble with certain rote things.

Though I should mention that I took notes during review sessions, it was just during the normal lectures I didn’t take notes, when I was still absorbing the material. I used the time when we were going over it again to write things down.

I have to say though, I’ve had way more students than teachers baffled at this. To students it seems to me that the response is “You… you can’t do that!” And have bought into the idea that taking notes is Important™, and if you don’t take notes you’re lazy, a slacker, and/or bound to fail the class. I’ve asked some teachers/professors earnestly about not taking notes and they generally say “Meh, if it works for you, it works. Power to ya.” And otherwise generally say that what makes a good student tends to be involvement and thinking about the material, independent of note taking habits.

This isn’t to evangelize not taking notes. It exists for a reason, and I’m sure a lot of students do well with it. I’m more curious about how students/teachers/random dopers feel about not taking notes, and whether any other people have the same learning quirk.

2

I think it’s going to be a YMMV thing. Different people will learn differently, and it will make a huge difference what kind of subject matter you are trying to learn.

In some cases there is content you just need to force into your brain somehow and there’s no way you’re going to grok it at this stage. The act of writing such things down (even if you never go back to those notes) increases your chance of retaining such data.

But I would agree that taking down every word a lecturer is saying is worse than useless.

Also, even if you’re not taking notes per se, you may still want to make notes during a lecture of things like “Need to lookup what she meant by <blah>”.

3

I question note-taking, as colleges move more and more to the “discussion” model and away from the “lecture” model. I just reviewed my notebooks from college, and a bigger mess of drawings, idle thoughts, signature practicing, lists of baseball players, you never saw.

4

Most everyone has laptops or tablets open in class these days (well, keep in mind this is a bit skewed since I was a Comp Sci major). For me, this involved typing it into Google or Wikipedia and either quickly reading it (which the teachers actually encouraged), or leaving the tab open for later.

5

It depends on the student. Some students can listen to every word that comes out of my mouth and never write anything down and do fine. But it’s much more common that they THINK they can do so, wind up daydreaming halfway through lecture, then ask me to repeat things I’ve already covered or beg notes from their friends.

Note-taking can be an incredibly useful way of learning. The act of listening and physically writing something down is immensely useful. Language teachers who set lists of words to copy 3x or 10x aren’t doing it for their health, they’re doing it so the words will set in your brain better. Note-taking can be similar to this.

It depends on the subject as well. In an English lit course where the professor is discussing the different subtexts of a Melville novel, maybe you can focus enough to go without notes. But it is a rare bird indeed who can go without taking notes in the history classes I teach–simply because I am going to throw a lot of information at you and I expect you to be able to keep up and make the connections with me. Now, I don’t typically expect my students to memorize lists of dates (although I do expect them to know basic facts without having to look them up–but you should be able to name the starting and ending months and years of, say, World War One, without a reference guide. The battle of the Somme? Look up the date, I don’t care–I’m more concerned that you know who was fighting at the Somme and why it was such a shitshow, for example), but it can be incredibly useful for the student to write down a name or date in order to mark it in their memory as "important!!!"I can’t speak for a math class or a science class, though.

In short: it depends.

6

I took notes up until my second year of psychology when I took a class on cognitive development and the lecturer provided copies of his notes at the end of the class and asked us just to listen and absorb the information during the lectures. I remember more from that course than any other course I did at uni.

7

I had two profs get angry at me and a friend for not taking notes during class.

In one case the teacher had provided an example problem on the board, and gave the class a couple of minutes to work through the problem on their own. It wasn’t going to be turned in for credit, but then the teacher noticed me and my friend not working through the problem, so he changed his mind and had everyone hand in their work, to be graded for credit.

In another class, the prof occasionally put individuals on the spot to answer questions related to whatever he was currently lecturing on. He saw my friend not taking notes, and asked him one of these questions. When my friend was unable to answer, the prof asked him - in a voice that was calm, but full of barely suppressed rage - “if you don’t know this, why aren’t you taking notes?”

8

Obviously it depends on the type of class too. I took notes in one of my anthropology gen eds because most of it was terminology and “remember this fact!” rather than concepts. (I didn’t take notes in my Japanese classes, however, because they actively discouraged it, since all vocab etc was in the book and they wanted us to focus on listening/talking, but normally in a language class I would too)

In my recent experience, pretty much all professors provide slides, lecture notes, and supplementary material online now. This definitely aided in my ability to not take notes because I had something to reference in case I had to look something up. If they didn’t do this, I’d likely have been paranoid and taken notes.

This is why I still carried paper and pencils with me. If the teacher wanted us to work out a problem, I’d still take out the paper and do it. I participated in class activities, I just didn’t take lecture notes.

This is a drawback, I can’t immediately reference something said earlier in class. Usually it takes me a little bit (a day or so) to really absorb the information I’m getting. Then again, I’m one of those weirdos who will pace around his house for 3 hours stuck in deep thought about what was discussed in class sometimes.

9

This was me in college. I was one of the top students in the degree program at a small university. A professor once asked a good friend (in the same classes) if I was cheating since I didn’t take notes a I didn’t seem to be paying attention. I was paying attention, I just have a bit of ADD and can’t focus in the traditional “sit up straight in the chair, facing forward, eyes on the professor” manner.

10

I knew kids at uni who never took a note in class, insisting it was more effective for them to, as you, be fully attentive during the lecture instead of a stenographer. They saved their note taking skills for later that evening, reviewing the lecture topic and producing notes then. They swore by it as far less stressful and much more effective. It had the added bonus of leading everyone to believe they were naturally gifted in some way. I can’t imagine how you’d prepare for exams with no notes at all. I’m sure some can do it, but I doubt most!

11

I taught a three month intensive foreign language course. It was 8 hours a day. I had one student who never took notes. When the course ended, he spoke fluently. On occasion we will get together. When we do, we speak almost entirely in the foreign language.

12

Most teachers nowadays provide their lecture material and often personal notes online. They’re not complete and student-taken notes are obviously more thorough and often more clear/salient, but if you understand the material they get the job done.

Another point is that most upper division classes in science/math/engineering/philosophy fields are highly conceptual. Preparing for a test is much more like torture testing an idea than reviewing material. It’s much better to ask questions of yourself in the shower/walking home/etc like “Is it possible to <…> with <…>” or “If I did x, then what would happen?” than it is to review anything actually covered in class. I’m fairly sure I couldn’t have actually gotten away with this if I were a history major.

13

It very much depends on the class and on the professor. I am currently going back to school and I do find myself taking less notes - but that does not mean no notes. I just feel like what i write down is way more important. I don’t attempt to write everything the prof says, just what i really want to stick in my head.

And when I did my term paper last semester in one of my classes, the notes were very handy to look through.

14

Teachers who don’t provide some form of prepared lecture notes are lazy. Expecting the students write down what is being presented means that they are trailing the presentation by copying it, not thinking about the content as it is presented.

My experience is mostly in engineering classes where the material doesn’t vary much each time the course is taught, so prepared lecture notes should be easy if the professor had taught the class more than once. The most valuable classes I attended were ones that had printed copies of the lecture available so you could listen, easily follow the concept, and add you own notes if needed.

15

I did have one gen ed teacher that flaunted his lecture notes in front of the class and declared that he was deliberately not going to share them with us because we should take notes and the modern university is a sham and only 2-5% of students should graduate and almost everyone should fail his class but the department won’t let him, but he’ll still make it as hard for us as possible and blah blah. (I got an A, I took notes, but barely any. I always found instructors who give speeches like that at the beginning of the term adorable)

16

I always felt strange being the only one (it seemed) not taking notes. I never took notes in high school, college or law school. Class was mostly about discussing things that were in the assigned readings. Why would I want notes of a discussion? I would even know what to write down. If I wanted to study, I’d go back to the written materials.

17

As I remember it, taking notes was useful even if I never looked at them again.
It meant I understood things well enough to put it down in my own succinct words.
Not so coincidentally, that’s also when I would come up with good questions.

I wouldn’t see much value in getting the teachers nicely typed notes. It may not be worthless but perhaps redundant.

18

In grad school, I developed the habit of taking notes because I realized that I process information much better when it is written down. Graduate classes are also highly unlikely to have lecture notes prepared by the professor.

I think it’s important to consider note-taking as am important skill to develop during high school and college in its own right. In most white collar positions, there will be meetings. You’re going to have to remember what decisions were made during the meeting and what tasks were assigned to you - or to the people you manage. The senior manager who never even brought note-taking materials to meetings and never did any of the things that were discussed during meetings? He was let go last month.

19

This is how I feel. Though I do know what to write down, I just find it distracting to do so.

Divvying up tasks and recording important decisions is one time when I do take notes*, because it’s important to remember exactly what happened and why. I just find it actually detrimental for learning new concepts.

  • Those usually for group projects we took a room with a white board, wrote things on the board as we went along, then typed up the stuff on the board and did a mass email at the end of the meeting.
20

If you don’t go to class, you don’t need to take notes.

In law school, for all of the first and second year classes certainly, your grade was whatever you got on the exam at the end of the semester. So there were people you wouldn’t even know were students until exam week because they literally had full time jobs. I remember one guy being so late for the evidence exam they were ready to lock the doors. Then they heard the forklift that was carrying his huge balls.