In this article, I will be covering everything related to how to take better study notes and actually check if your notes are working for you or not. This particular topic is something a lot of students ignore completely and then they wonder why they blank out in the exam even after studying so hard. So if you want to make sure your notes are actually useful come revision time then read this article till end.
Hello guys! What's up? My name is Prince Upadhyay and welcome to MegaMocks, your go-to place for exam prep tools and study strategies. So let's start with the topic...
So since a lot of students are spending hours and hours making notes so naturally they assume that more notes means more preparation. But that is not really how it works you know. I have seen people sit with four full notebooks and still fail because the notes they made were basically just a copy paste of the textbook and nothing more than that. In addition, a lot of students have reported that after making all those notes they still feel like they have not studied anything and honestly I used to feel that too back when I was making notes the wrong way.
The reason is simple, notes are not for collecting information. Notes are for processing it and making it your own and that is the whole point. If your notes look exactly like the textbook then what was even the point of writing them down.
In this article I won't be going deep into how to study for specific subjects or exams which I have already covered that in another article. So do check that one out but later on. Right now let's focus on what makes notes actually good and how you can check if yours are doing the job or not.
So the first thing you need to understand is what notes are even for and there are actually two reasons you take notes and most people only think about one of them. The first reason is that when you are first reading or listening to something, writing it down helps you actually understand it rather than just passively absorbing it and forgetting it. And the second reason is that later when you come back to revise, your notes should work as a quick and clear reference so you do not have to go back to the original source every single time. Both of these things matter and this is something a lot of people do not realise.
Now let me tell you the signs that your notes are actually working. So the first thing is and this is the real test honestly, you should be able to pick up your notes after two or three weeks and still understand them without needing to open the textbook at all. If you open your notes and feel confused then something went wrong when you made them. The second thing is that your notes should be in your own language and not copied sentences from whatever you were reading. When I was in school and I remember this clearly, I used to just copy sentences word for word and feel really productive and then when the exam came I had no idea what any of it actually meant because I never processed it.
So good notes highlight the key concepts and formulas and examples and that is it. Not every single detail. Just the important stuff. And they should be organised by topic you know, not just in the order things were taught. Because when you are revising a particular topic you do not want to go hunting through five different sections of your notebook and all that.
Now let me tell you the signs that your notes have problems. The first sign is that they are really long but when you need to find something specific you just cannot find it and it takes forever. That is a problem. The second sign is that you wrote everything in the exact language of the textbook or the lecture slides and did not change a single word. The third sign and this one is sneaky, is that the notes feel complete when you look at them but when you close them you cannot actually recall anything without reading them line by line. That is a big problem because in an exam you will not have your notes in front of you.
And then there is the coverage problem. So since students tend to take better notes on topics they find easy or interesting so the topics that were harder or boring in class end up with almost nothing in the notebook. And those are exactly the topics that will trip you up in an exam. So you have to go through your notes for every topic and actually check where the gaps are.
The Notes Completeness Checker is really useful for this particular thing. What you do is you rate your notes for each topic from one to five and it shows you a clear picture of where your coverage is weak. Any topic you rate two or below needs to be fixed before exam day. I generally find that when I do this kind of audit I always discover two or three topics I thought I had covered but actually had almost nothing useful for.
Go back to the textbook or the slides and just write a one page summary. Not everything, just the five to eight most important points and then close the book and test yourself right away without looking at anything.
In this case the best thing you can do is rewrite them and I know that sounds tedious but actually rewriting notes from memory is one of the most powerful study things you can do and it will show you very quickly which parts you do not really understand versus which parts you just think you understand. It forces active processing and reveals exactly what you don't actually understand.
Go through them and mark only the things that could genuinely appear in an exam question and ignore the rest for revision purposes. Everything else is background context useful for understanding but not for revision and all that.
Now let me explain the logic behind the one page rule which I personally think is the most useful thing in this whole article. Why? Because when you force yourself to reduce an entire topic to one single page of key points you cannot just copy and paste information. You have to actually understand it enough to decide what matters and what does not. If you cannot do that then it means you do not understand the topic well enough yet and that is something you need to fix before the exam not during it.
One page of notes that you deeply understand is honestly worth more than five pages of copied text that you will blank on when the pressure is actually on you. I am not even exaggerating with this particular one.
Now the last part is about how to actually use your notes for revision and this is something a lot of people get wrong. The mistake is sitting down and reading your notes like you are reading a book. What you should do instead is cover the notes, write down everything you can remember about the topic from your head, and then check. The parts where your recall does not match what is in your notes, those are exactly the parts you need to spend more time on.
Your notes are a reference, not a script. The whole goal is to need them less and less as the exam gets closer and honestly that is the only mindset that will actually get you through.
Rate your notes topic by topic and get a clear picture of where your gaps are before exam day. I generally use this particular tool every time before I start my revision and honestly it saves a lot of time.
Open Notes Completeness Checker →So friends, this was What Good Study Notes Actually Look Like (And How to Check Yours), was this article helpful to you? Let me know which particular method you are going to try first, in the comments section below. Till then, I'm signing off, So stay tuned and stay safe...😊