My definitive guide to note-taking and exam preparation in school
2024-05-05
Anyone still in school or just learning something new for that matter needs a good note-taking system to write down new knowledge, make it easy to find old information and help you become better. But especially in school with rather frequent and sometimes extensive exams, choosing an effective and trustworthy system is crucial to keep track of things and help with exam preparation, which is its own rabit hole in by itself. That's why I want to share the systems that worked really successfully for me in this article, so let's take a look...
Most students of my generation take notes digitally and so am I. While some strongly prefer to type everything due to the higher speed once you're used to touch typing, others swear by handwriting for its much higher flexibility and more "natural" feeling. Personally, I do a combination of both with LibreOffice Writer as my word processor for the subjects that revolve mostly around producing text like all of the languages, social sciences etc. and Xournal++ as my handwriting program for all the other subjects with need for more free form notes like music notes, binary trees in computer science or diagrams and schematics in physics and math. The exact software you use doesn't really matter though, what matters is to keep a neat table of contents , give all your notes meaningful titles and highlight important sections right away to make them stand out. Some programs might offer useful tools to help with this, but it is worth the time even if you need to do everything manually, as it greatly reduces the effort to start with exam preparation once everything is already sorted by significance and you only have to look for the relevant parts for your exam among this selection.
Looking back at the last few years, I would highly recommend to take as many notes as possible by hand (preferably digitally), since I really notice a difference in how good my long-term memory of the subjects I typed versus wrote by hand in is. This is probably somewhat biased though, because I'm also much more interested in math, computer science and physics, which are the primary subjects a took handwritten notes in, and put in the effort to constantly create and study flashcards of the highlighted sections for these, which is also a huge booster for good memorization of knowledge. As I'm already taking digital notes, I also chose to use the popular flashcard software Anki and honestly couldn't be happier. After each school day, I simply sit down for 10 minutes, take screenshots of my newly highlighted notes and create flashcards from them and together with around 15 to 20 minutes of card studying in the morning this already is an excellent exam preparation that is easy to maintain and also allows me to perform outstandingly well in class due to my active knowledge of all the topics we covered in the last few years. For my foreign languages I also just study some downloaded decks from the AnkiWeb community regularly and that's another amazing way to keep a language active you don't use that regularly otherwise - apart from consuming content in that language and chatting with other people of course.
When it comes to real exam preparation though, I do what anyone preaches about anyway - starting early and favouring more, smaller learning sessions over fewer, but longer ones . For important exams I usually start of a month ahead of time by creating a rough studying plan in the projects section of my private note-taking software Standard Notes, which I organize by the GTD methodology. This plan includes a schedule of when to study (usually 1 hour per day) that I also transfer into my calendar to block this time for learning, a brief overview of the relevant topics and a detailed checklist of all the important aspects I can think of right away or that were mentioned by my teacher. Creating such a plan might sound silly and seem like a waste of time, but it takes even more pressure out of the preparation itself by giving me rather strict guidelines for what to do when, which makes actually doing it so much easier. The next step then is to create specific study notes (so-called Lernzettel here in Germany) containing relevant knowledge about all the topics mentioned in the studying plan, which usually is a rather straight forward process, since I already highlighted important sections in my general notes and just have to copy the relevant ones over.
This dedicated Lernzettel is great to check if I know everything important and reactivate the knowledge I don't frequently need, but isn't my primary way of preparing for exams either - it's more of a reference book actually. In general, you can rank learning techniques in their effectiveness by how active their approach is and just reading through notes isn't that active at all and thus not preferred. Studying flashcards is already more active, since you have to recall to information before turning it over, but the real killer techniques are working through exercise exams and even better explaining the topic to others . With these you have to abstract the knowledge and put it to use or think of ways to explain it, both of which require a deep understanding of the topic at hand and are extremely active from a neuroscientific perspective. Just doing that as much as possible (preferably in a group) , worked wonders for me and has proven to be a reliable as well as somewhat fun way to prepare for exams.
Finally, I would encourage you to just take the day before the exam off from studying and use it instead to do something fun and get a good rest. This final day won't have a meaningful impact, if you started preparing early enough, anyway and being in a good mental as well as physical state is thus much more valuable than one more hour of studying. Prioritizing health, nutrition and exercise is also an important aspect in general when preparing for exams, as your brain can only process information most effectively, if your body is also in a good condition.
With that said, I hope that this article wasn't to frightening for you, maybe even somewhat helpful and am very curious about your personal preferences regarding note-taking and exam preparation. Feel free to share them in the comments down below and have a lovely day...