How to Take Better Notes and Do Well on Tests

Something I figured out early on in high school and later college is that note-taking plays a major role in how well you do in a class. In this article, I'll show you a few idea that helped me and that will hopefully help you as well.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• The desire to take better notes and/or to do better on tests.

1. First, it's very important to find out how a teacher or instructor bases his or her tests. You can find this out from other students or sometimes by asking the teacher yourself. This will save you a lot of time on studying things that won't help your grade. I enjoy learning, but at the same time I remember how time-pressured I was with multiple classes that I learned you have to be practical about these things.
2. When you get home or need to study, change your notes to fit your own personal learning style. I'm a very visual person, so while I was in school I often drew pictures whenever possible. I could recall images better than just words on a page. You can get really creative with this, using symbols to remind you of certain words and concepts.
3. If you're more of an auditory person, buy a recorder (or an attachment for your IPod) and record the lecture. I had a friend who did this and listened to the .mp3 files in her car during her commute to and from school. The repetition of it helped her remember the information naturally.
4. If you have a lot of notes, consider retyping them to reduce the number of pages you have to deal with. This helped me a lot, and I considered them better than the "cheat sheets" you can buy because they're personalized to the particular class.

Tips & Warnings

• In college, a syllabus given at the beginning of the semester may give you clues on where to focus your note-taking: on lectures, the textbook, or a combination of both.