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).