Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

Fascinating. I wondered if this would suggest note-taking in lectures (it doesn't). This is something I never did and then finally I bent to everyone saying it's the most important thing and I did awfully in Algebraic Geometry. I had to return to my old technique of just paying 100% attention with 0% note taking, and then creating short cheat sheets of techniques in LaTeX before the exam.

This is the first time I've come across any college advice that does not mention this and I'm glad for it. I just never got good at note-taking to be able to properly pay attention to the lecture.

I did not, it distracted me from listening. One of the key things to do was to do and not only read as many exercises as possible, including the old ones of the same professor. Then going back to reading the material once you got stuck.

Most of the time I studied with a good friend who had to go to the army and did not want to lose those years. So I prepared everything during the semester and taught it to him when he took some days off before the exams. Tough times but worked well for both of us.

A very good focus operator for exams was to ask the TA questions in the last exercises. The topics they answered quickly had a high chance of being relevant, because they had prepared them for the exams.

I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).

Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college

I find notes useful only in that they need to try to to figure out what to write next keeps me from daydreaming. I have dysgraphia so there is no hope I can read any notes latter, nor is there hope that I could possibly transcribe what is said word for words so I'm looking for the main points - which is what is most commonly recommended you write down.

I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.

> To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write

But that is worse than just listening and doing that in your head, so people who already listens the right way the note taking gets in the way, writing things down is strictly inferior if you know how to listen since it adds an unneeded extra step.

I never wrote things down in lectures and I could ace the math exams without studying more because I listened to the lectures. None of the people who took notes could do that, and neither could I the times I tried to take notes.