Med Student Notes

[Vickey Melling]

Doyou sometimes struggle to determine what to write down during lectures? Have you ever found yourself wishing you could take better or more effective notes? Whether you are sitting in a lecture hall or watching a lecture online, note-taking in class can be intimidating, but with a few strategic practices, anyone can take clear, effective notes. This handout will discuss the importance of note-taking, qualities of good notes, and tips for becoming a better note-taker.

Taking good notes in class is an important part of academic success in college. Actively taking notes during class can help you focus and better understand main concepts. In many classes, you may be asked to watch an instructional video before a class discussion. Good note-taking will improve your active listening, comprehension of material, and retention. Taking notes on both synchronous and asynchronous material will help you better remember what you hear and see.

After class, good notes are crucial for reviewing and studying class material so that you better understand it and can prepare appropriately for exams. Efficient and concise notes can save you time, energy, and confusion that often results from trying to make sense of disorganized, overwhelming, insufficient, or wordy notes. When watching a video, taking good notes can save you from the hassle of pausing, rewinding, and rewatching large chunks of a lecture. Good notes can provide a great resource for creating outlines and studying.

Now that you are prepared and organized, what can you do to take good notes while listening to a lecture in class? Here are some practical steps you can try to improve your in-class note-taking:

Taking notes in a way to fully understand all information presented conceptually and factually may differ between students. For instance, working memory, or the ability to process and manipulate information in-the-moment, is often involved in transcribing lecture notes, which is best done digitally; but there are individual differences in working memory processes that may affect which method works best for you. Research suggests that handwriting notes can help us learn and remember conceptual items better than digital notes. However, there are some pros to typing notes on a computer as well, including speed and storage. Consider these differences before deciding what is best for you.

Part of good note-taking includes revisiting your notes a day or so after class. During this time, check for clarity, fill in definitions of key terms, organize, and figure out any concepts you may have missed or not fully understood in class. Figure out what may be missing and what you may need to add or even ask about. If your lecture is recorded, you may be able to take advantage of the captions to review.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Learning Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Virginia Law Review invites eligible UVA law students who would like their work to be considered for publication in the Law Review to submit Notes three times per year: January, March, and October. Please check the Announcements page for precise dates and submission instructions. For further information and guidance, please refer to the Student Scholarship Manual here.

Notes are student-written articles. The Virginia Law Review accepts Note submissions from current J.D. candidates at the University of Virginia and from recent graduates who have received a J.D. from the University of Virginia within the preceding twelve months. Although many of the published Notes come from Law Review members, any law student or recent graduate may submit a paper for consideration, and all are encouraged to do so. Authors who are not members of the Law Review whose notes are accepted for publication prior to March 1 of their final year at the law school will be invited to join. First year law students whose Notes are accepted for publication will become members of the Law Review at the beginning of their second year.

There are three windows of time during which students may submit a Note for publication: January, March, and October. Each submission period includes two weeks for students to submit their Notes for consideration. Approximately 8-10 Notes are selected for publication each year on the basis of two primary factors, novel legal analysis that contributes to the field of legal scholarship and quality of writing.

Format: Notes must be submitted electronically via Dropbox and in hard copy form. Additionally, Notes will not be considered for publication unless the submissions follow specific guidelines. Review the submission instructions in the most recent Notes Pool posting on the Announcements page.

I am a second-year undergraduate student and in autumn I'll be starting my third year and after that there is the final fourth. I've come accross someone's lecture notes on eBay. The same uni. It's several years old so some stuff will have changed. It's not the ones we would receive from the lecturers, it's own work albeit based on lectures contents.

Nothing relevant to the assignments is there, only the theory. I intend to prepare during the summer to jump ahead because I want to pursue more advanced topics so it's not strictly out of laziness. I want to learn faster and I question the level of teaching, they don't care about initiative and ambition and I feel like they're holding me back.

I don't see anything wrong. If it were answers to exam questions, or even homework, then I'd be concerned. But the notes give you an alternate explanation of many topics and that is very useful (and proper). Books do the same, of course.

It is a fact that not every explanation of a complex topic is equally informative to a student. Having an alternative way of looking at topics can give you insight that you might not get from the lecture alone. It also gives you a way to prepare for an actual lecture beforehand, so that you are more likely to pick up the important points.

But don't use it as an excuse not to attend the lectures, or pay attention. Additionally, since the act of making notes (read: actively and efficiently summarising the important points of a lecture), is, for most people, a very good way to learn, it would most likely be a mistake to buy the notes as a substitute for making your own.

There's nothing ethically wrong with using resources outside of class for the purpose of teaching yourself the material. If anything, going beyond what you are given in the course to educate yourself is wonderful and indeed something that is expected at the graduate student level.

To reiterate points made in other answers and comments: no, in terms of learning things (!!!), it is absolutely fine to make use of other peoples' prior work. It would be laughable if we all had to reinvent the wheel, etc.

Yet, yes, there are some forms of academic stuff wherein there are "rules" prohibiting looking at all the stuff out in the world. The most ridiculous type is "it's not ok to use an idea not covered yet in the course".

EDIT: yes, certainly, as mentioned in comments (and as many people know), there is substantial reason to understand "what implies what", and often a sort of annihilating over-kill is far less enlightening than a more-restricted-means explanation.

In fact, questions which may be extremely awkward from a too-elementary viewpoint that become transparent from a more sophisticated viewpoint are things that I myself like to emphasize to my students in graduate courses. Not everything does yield to a more sophisticated viewpoint, of course. But quite a few of the introduction-to-advanced-math questions are indeed hardly tractable from an elementary viewpoint (and this is visible historically, motivating a great deal of modern math!), but/and become mundane from our contemporary viewpoint (which was motivated by wanting to mundane-ize such questions, hm!).

Your intentions to use it as a supplement rather than a replacement are admirable but you should know that some fields move quite quickly. If it were lecture notes on, say, web technology or some software API, then I would say "Don't waste your money". That's an extreme example because web technology and some software packages move pretty quick and you often want to start your learning with the most up-to-date technology. Even "history" gets updated as new finds are uncovered, although the pace might be slower than technology.

If some of the courses have changed lecturer, or been updated, you might find that ploughing through 2-year-old notes is irrelevant, confusing and a waste of effort. But you should be able to tell quite quickly as long as you're using it as a supplement rather than a replacement.

I have a professor who has published his lecture notes in the form of a book. The only way to get access to his lecture notes is to purchase them from an off-campus bookstore. To me, this seems like a highly unethical, if not illegal, practice. Shouldn't students have access to lecture notes as part of the tuition fees that they have paid?

A common question seems to be whether we are actually required to purchase the notes. To clarify, he routinely skips teaching chapters in class and asks them to read them from the notes on our own. So yes, we have to buy the notes if we want to be taught the entire syllabus.

Edit: The notes are different from the textbook. The textbook is not really needed, while the notes are fully needed. I'm seeing people confusing the two and claiming that many professors prescribe their own textbooks for the courses. My question is to whether access to notes should be free and universal for every student in the lecture.

Not necessarily. If the course requires materials that have a non-negligible cost, then typically students will be required to pay for them separately. This includes textbooks, lab supplies, and, as in this case, custom-printed "course packets" of notes or other reading material.

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