<p>In your experience, which one do you think is the more informative one? Do you think both help to a certain degree, or do you only use one of them as your only tool to learning the material?</p>
<p>It totally depends on the professor, and whether or not you’re talking about understanding the material or getting a “good grade”. Many professors use the textbooks as supplemental material and take exams almost entirely from the lectures, other professors rely more on the textbooks themselves.</p>
<p>I think for science/math type classes, the textbooks not only help in so far as they explain the material in a different way, but they also have problem sets that can help with practicing the application of the concepts.</p>
<p>In my experience, skimming the textbooks for my other classes (poli sci, history, whatever) has been enough.</p>
<p>I agree with srcameron, depends entirely on the class and professor.</p>
<p>That’s true, but I guess I could make a distinction between science/math courses and social science/humanities courses.</p>
<p>During first year, textbooks didn’t help. Other than mandatory textbook problems, I didn’t read any of my textbooks for my science/math/engineering courses. The only exception is, as expected, my psychology course, which heavily relies on memorization rather than grasping the concepts and using logical intuition.</p>