Online Student Survival Guide

I know several college professors who routinely assign 60, 80, 100 pages between lectures. When you look at those assignments objectively, between 80-90% should be nothing more than review and you can skim through that part in very short order. If you don’t remember much of it from high school or other courses, it will take longer, of course – but the point is very simply to bring everyone, coming from a diversity of schools and backgrounds, up to the point where everyone is essentially on the same page, and to get there as quickly as possible.

Either way, you really should take notes. There’s something happening here that’s quite magical – at least that’s how it has always worked for me: the mere act of summarizing forces me to focus on what’s being covered, and somehow the act of writing it down accomplishes a lot more than you would imagine. That “focusing and concentrating on what’s being covered” is important, but only a small part of what’s going on. You are actively taking responsibility for learning this material, and involving both mental and physical responses while you’re listening or reading.

Now the trick, as I see it, is to follow-up as soon as possible, while the lecture or reading is still fresh in memory, and go over your notes, doing whatever spell checking, rewriting, editing, etc. that is necessary to have the kind of notes when you’re preparing for an exam or graded performance without going into a wild panic and re-live the entire term at the last minute with ridiculous cram sessions, all-nighters, marathon study binges, or other pathologies common to students who never learned to manage their time or their studies.

By comparison, a 3-semester hour lecture could be reduced to a single chapter of maybe 20-30 pages depending on charts, graphs, and other illustrations. Personally, I’d much rather have the huge readings, and the charts, graphs, and other illustrations in my textbook, and, hopefully, use much more time in class for Q&A and discussions to stretch and flex our collective synapses, and even get lectures that go WAY beyond the textbook!

I really think the mechanics don’t matter that much, so whether you just jot down a few words and phrases, names, dates, terms, etc. or try to be a stenographer or court reporter, what you absolutely, positively must do to really hard-wired this information into your brain is to review it as soon as possible afterward. The rationale is very easy to grasp – you want notes that are going to be truly useful when it comes time to review for the final exam. Fix the errors and omissions in your notes while it’s still fresh in your memory; don’t wait until the end of the term!

For example, I use a variation of the Cornell method combined with Guelph SQ3R method. If at all possible, I like to go over my notes within an hour of the lecture. lab, or reading/study session; otherwise, I’ll make time if necessary to get it done within 24 hours. I’m looking for ‘typos’ and all the ‘good stuff’ that I left out of my notes on the first attempt. This is a major rewrite that’s going to take nearly half as long as the original lecture time, lab, etc., so don’t confuse it with a cursory read-through or quick proofreading, or it’ll come back to haunt you at the end of the term.

Generally, there will be one or two things that really stand out and demand a follow through. I’ll make a note of this, and the possible ways to satisfy it – almost always it’s no more than a 5-10 minute detour using google, but more times than not it works to my advantage bringing the lecture, textbook, and other learning resources together into something much more understandable than skipping over it because I don’t have time or it’s not going to be on the exam.

Most colleges and universities have extensive handouts and tutorials online, often on the library server. The wonderful part about this is that aside from specific peculiarities about mechanical requirements for papers, not just APA or MLA or whatever, virtually everything in the helps section is necessarily going to be generic – so you can use any college or university you like for this!

There is an fairly comprehensive page on notetaking systems at CalPoly – in case the results from a google search are a bit overwhelming.