What's the best way to take notes in class?

SLACFac
Sun, 21 Jul 2013 21:19:33 +0000

Please do note that some professors are really not cool with recordings (for intellectual property issues, privacy issues w/r/t other student contributions in class, etc.). If a professor cares enough to issue an explicit ban, I’d respect it. At my institution, violating that type of request (without having appropriate accommodation on file) could land you in front of the Honor Council.

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smurray, do you really try to “write everything down” in a lecture? That’s generally an approach that most professors try to discourage because students who do write down everything often have difficulty remembering/selecting the most essential information and this can lead to problems when it comes to figuring out what to study for exams, remembering important interpretive points for discussion, etc.

Most of the professors I know agree that you should use your notes to highlight key claims that are usually signaled either by being written on the board/included in a PPT (the person who suggested printing out slides is on the right track) or being repeated multiple times in lecture (heck, for the really important things, I tell my students point-blank, “write this down”).

Most people who try to get everything down aren’t giving themselves the breathing room to bat around ideas and try to make connections across readings, etc. However, it’s that playing around with ideas and connections that leads to the types of observations that let a student do well in discussion (if there’s any) and write engaging papers (if it’s that type of class). Most of my best students in seminar have notes that do not look at all like the stereotype of what good notes ought to be.