Note-taking - art or waste of time?

[pi]

Wait so what did you do in vce to get your amazing scores?

I'll be honest, I didn't do much

In class we did next to no work (except in spesh), usually playing Counter Strike, watching youtube, doing The Age puzzles, talking, etc.

At home I did a lot of English (reading, annotating my text a lot, writing essays before SACs) and Spesh (every question from the book). I did a little bit of Chem and Methods before SACs, but not really any questions from books. I never touched physics LOL.

I guess if you understand it then hard work doesn't need to be done, so then yr12 can be a fun year

[jimmy22]

If you took down notes in a Biology class, and then summarised your notes when you get home by understanding the concepts first and then writing short summaries on a laptop, do you think this would be beneficial?

[pi]

If you took down notes in a Biology class, and then summarised your notes when you get home by understanding the concepts first and then writing short summaries on a laptop, do you think this would be beneficial?

Yeah, I kinda wished I took notes back when I did bio. Definitely would have helped.

[acinod]

I never made notes for anything other than spesh in high school.

Make notes for everything in uni (so much rote learning *sigh*)

A lot of VCE students going into uni will be like this. So all of you who say you aren't making notes now but are still in VCE, you'll start to feel pressured to do it in uni. I think maybe next year I might start to take notes, get out my colored pens and hardcover notebook

Wait so what did you do in vce to get your amazing scores?

I guess with VCE there weren't a lot of concepts, it was just a big concept and you have to figure out all the tricks. To perfect this it was just practice by doing heaps of questions and understanding them. There is a lot more rote learning in uni. There is actually so much more to learn that VCE felt so easy. Like maths right now is similar to law, rote-learn 50 theorems and use it to prove a case :O

[Aaron]

Ehh, I find notes helps me alot with my learning. Except i don't write down chunks and chunks only just the main important points of the section so that if a question comes up in an examination for example, I can write down those points i've written in my notes and then branch off from that.

Then again, people learn and absorb info in different ways I guess.

[Jenny_2108]

How do you guys take notes? Do you guys have special pens or highlighters to help you out?

My chem, bio, eng notes are from end of year revision lectures of connect edu
My maths notes I bought from Derrick Ha
So overall I didn't takes lots of notes, I just combine the handouts which my teachers gave me with revision lecture notes. And actually, I don't use them much because my subjects do not require rote-learning except bio

If you took down notes in a Biology class, and then summarised your notes when you get home by understanding the concepts first and then writing short summaries on a laptop, do you think this would be beneficial?

Yeah, as long as you understand everything, whatever you do will be fine. I highly recommend you to summary by yourself because you will remember things better
What I did in bio is, my teacher has a powerpoint which summaries the whole unit 4, I just print them off and cram 20 pages for 2 hrs the night before bio exam. That explains why I bombed bio exam last week 

There is a lot more rote learning in uni. There is actually so much more to learn that VCE felt so easy. Like maths right now is similar to law, rote-learn 50 theorems and use it to prove a case :O

I thought before you use theorem in uni maths, you need to prove it first? So after you prove it, you must have understood everything already? Btw, do you study pure maths?

[LeviLamp]

I'm looking at a rather unexceptional but still really good score of between 94 and 96 (possibly 97 but that doesn't seem too likely) and have only ended up doing five subjects (advice: don't do enhancement English ).
I never took notes in English (I got full marks for every single SAC, and I think my indicative grade was a 98 or 99, but I bungled the end-of-year exam and only got a middling B+, so my score was pushed to raw 39) and for Methods I took notes and went to lectures but my revision consisted solely of worked problems and practice exams, and I feel like my two exams went well for that as well. I took a huge amount of notes for Yr 12 Bio last year, but I had no exam technique so it was those notes that carried me through the second exam, on which I dropped a grade from the first, but I feel like all my Bio notes were really worth it, and a raw 41 is fine by me. For Chem, I'm having mixed feelings, especially as the exam is only four days away.
But I can say in conclusion that note taking for me can be useful, but it depends on the rote learning emphasis of the subject.

[Mr Keshy]

Wait so what did you do in vce to get your amazing scores?

I'll be honest, I didn't do much

In class we did next to no work (except in spesh), usually playing Counter Strike, watching youtube, doing The Age puzzles, talking, etc.

At home I did a lot of English (reading, annotating my text a lot, writing essays before SACs) and Spesh (every question from the book). I did a little bit of Chem and Methods before SACs, but not really any questions from books. I never touched physics LOL.

I guess if you understand it then hard work doesn't need to be done, so then yr12 can be a fun year

Great, I do that in class all the time... My future is certain then.

 

[Fyrefly]

In addition to what others have said, I'd like to mention that it also depends on the lecturer. If you've a lecturer that simply reads off the lecture slides, then there's no point taking notes (there's probably no point even going to the lecture, lol). However, if you've a lecturer that goes beyond the lecture slides by giving useful examples, talking more in-depth about the material, etc., then I think there's value in note-taking. These extra notes really help come revision time.

Most importantly though, not only is note-taking often helpful for the sake of learning itself, but it's also a great guide as to what's going to be on the exam. Whenever a lecturer seems to be stressing a particular point or topic (read: you've got notes a page long for one particular slide)... well, let's just say that whatever a lecturer feels is most important or essential will be what ends up on the exam. Sometimes the lecturer will even directly say, "This is important guys, please write this down." When a lecturer says that, you'd be a fool not to do it.

I literally knew every question that would be on my final exam for tax law this semester - including a question about an offbeat, nitty gritty little legisative clause that was but a single slide in a 126-slide lecture. Sometimes you don't guess all the questions correctly and exactly, but that mostly comes down to a bit of luck, gut feeling and practice (veteran fourth year reporting in).

The reality is that at the end of the day, sometimes at university passing a unit and fully understanding that unit's material are not synonymous. The pace at university is ridiculously fast and sometimes it's near-impossible to do all of the readings and study required of you. Sometimes you need to cut corners. I do believe that taking notes helps you better decide where you can afford to cut corners.

[Biceps]

Throughout VCE i have not taken notes at all i just learned everything from internet videos and teacher explanation. Then i just moved on to trial exams and questions from the book to reinforce what i learned.

[Yendall]

Depends on what the subject is. I find note taking for math-based subjects worthwhile, whilst listening and practicing is better for English and essay-based subjects. I find writing notes for subjects like English quite boring and tedious, i'd rather discuss and then write essays.

[Limista]

Think I'm the opposite to everyone on this thread! I absolutely love making notes, am dependent on them, and feel as though I haven't actually learned anything if I have not made them.

I dislike printing other peoples' notes off, or using them word-for-word, because once again, I feel as if I'm just rote learning or cramming and not really understanding the concepts. To me, making your own notes is an individual thing, such that you write stuff down in a way that YOU can really connect with it and understand it or feel motivated to learn what's required. For example, notes aren't just the typical black-white dot points/paragraphs or chunks of useless info. To be honest, my notes consist of venn-diagrams, tables, random diagrams and highlighted stuff, because that's how I connect with what I'm learning. I'm also a visual person, so I find that making visual notes helps me to learn a lot. Some of my notes are even posters of things with mind-maps, so I can imagine how all the different concepts link together.

I never copy stuff down word-for-word from the textbook to be in my notes. First, I read what's given in the textbook and then put it into my own words. I find this helps to strengthen the neural connections and makes me more engaged with what I'm supposed to do. I also impose a time limit on myself ~ e.g. will finish acid & base chemistry notes in an hour, so I pretend like I'm in an exam situation where I have to answer questions in that time 

It also gives me great pleasure to hold my notes like a politician (Obama is very influential, what can I say  ) and walk around my study and recite the notes to my piano/teddy bear/bookshelf or even pretend that I'm some sort of lecturer. This probably stems from my love to public speak and debate!

So basically, I find making notes very helpful for EVERY subject (yeah, I'm a nerd lol) !!

[peterpan101]

Think I'm the opposite to everyone on this thread! I absolutely love making notes, am dependent on them, and feel as though I haven't actually learned anything if I have not made them.

I dislike printing other peoples' notes off, or using them word-for-word, because once again, I feel as if I'm just rote learning or cramming and not really understanding the concepts. To me, making your own notes is an individual thing, such that you write stuff down in a way that YOU can really connect with it and understand it or feel motivated to learn what's required. For example, notes aren't just the typical black-white dot points/paragraphs or chunks of useless info. To be honest, my notes consist of venn-diagrams, tables, random diagrams and highlighted stuff, because that's how I connect with what I'm learning. I'm also a visual person, so I find that making visual notes helps me to learn a lot. Some of my notes are even posters of things with mind-maps, so I can imagine how all the different concepts link together.

I never copy stuff down word-for-word from the textbook to be in my notes. First, I read what's given in the textbook and then put it into my own words. I find this helps to strengthen the neural connections and makes me more engaged with what I'm supposed to do. I also impose a time limit on myself ~ e.g. will finish acid & base chemistry notes in an hour, so I pretend like I'm in an exam situation where I have to answer questions in that time 

It also gives me great pleasure to hold my notes like a politician (Obama is very influential, what can I say  ) and walk around my study and recite the notes to my piano/teddy bear/bookshelf or even pretend that I'm some sort of lecturer. This probably stems from my love to public speak and debate!

So basically, I find making notes very helpful for EVERY subject (yeah, I'm a nerd lol) !!

same
if i dont take notes i forget everything !

[EvangelionZeta]

I think notetaking is something that very much depends on the individual and your learning style (as many have already suggested).  I know that I learn better when I feel like I am being actively engaged in a "discussion" of sorts (even if it's a lecture), so I will listen very intently to what the person is saying, and then only write a quick dot point summary of key ideas after I'm sure I've mentally absorbed what has been communicated.  I find this also helps as well, in that you then have to rewrite the idea in your own words, meaning that you learn to crystalise the ideas being learned even further in the note-taking process.

[Mr Keshy]

I love taking neat notes because I think it'll be useful come exam revision time.

I started Year 12 headstart today. Fresh new books. Fresh new stationary

• One red, one blue and one black pen. One pencil
• One eraser
• One wooden ruler
• labelled each book neatly
• Ruled each page I worked on in Red
• Titles in black
• Writing in blue
• Question numbers in red

1 months time

• One red, one blue and one black pen. One pencil

Begging friends for spare pens

• One eraser

Letting friend borrow, steals it instead

• One wooden ruler

Same as above or someone eats it

• labelled each book neatly

Can't really change that

• Ruled each page I worked on in Red

Progressively rule in what ever pen I'm holding, then gradually phase out this "unnecessary" practice

• Titles in black

Probably will be the only pen I have

• Writing in blue

Above

• Question numbers in red

Above