How To Take Effective Notes At University

Taking great notes isn’t about writing down everything you see on the screen. It’s about creating a note-taking system that helps you truly understand the material—not just for lectures, but for assignments and exams too.

Common Note-Taking Mistakes to Avoid

If you’re struggling with note-taking, you might be making one of these common mistakes:

1. Writing too much: Copying everything from the slides word-for-word doesn’t help you understand the material—it just wastes time.
2. Not preparing before class: Walking into a lecture with no idea what’s coming makes note-taking hard and can be overwhelming.
3. Focusing on quantity over quality: It’s better to have concise, meaningful notes than pages of information.

Follow these steps to take effective notes at university:

My Step-by-Step Note-Taking Method

1. Get the Lecture Slides

Most professors provide lecture slides as a PowerPoint or PDF before class. If they don’t, you can usually request them. Once you have the slides:

• Convert them to a Word document. If it’s a PowerPoint, save it as a PDF, then copy and paste the content into Word. This lets you edit and format the slides however you like.
• Reformat for notes. Use bullet points and headings. The less paragraph-form your notes are, the better. Add space between the content or create margins where you can write down your thoughts or other content the lecturer discusses.

2. Prepare Your Notes Before Class

Before the lecture, go through the slides and:

• Skim the content, paying attention to any graphs, charts, or equations that seemed important.
• Screenshot anything that looks particularly relevant and drop it into the Word document next to the relevant text.

This quick review makes the material familiar, so when the lecture begins, you can focus on listening and understanding instead of scrambling to copy notes.

3. Take Notes During Class

With your pre-prepared notes, you can now focus on what the lecturer is saying and write down:

• Key explanations: Insights they provided that weren’t on the slides.
• Your understanding: How you interpret the material in your own words.
• Questions: Things you didn’t understand to follow up on later.

Pro Tip: Lecturers often omit important details from the slides on purpose. They want you to attend the class, so their verbal explanations are crucial.

4. Digitize Your Notes

One of the best things about having your notes in Word is that they were searchable. If you need to find information for an assignment or exam, you can use Ctrl+F (or Command+F on a Mac) to quickly locate what you need. This saves you so much time compared to flipping through handwritten pages.

If you have classes where you would prefer to take handwritten notes [e.g., maths equations, organic chemistry drawings] then take a picture or scan the pages and add these images to your digitised notes.

Benefits of This Method

This system isn’t just about making notes—it’s about making sense of them. By preparing your notes before class and focusing on understanding during the lecture, you can come away with a deeper grasp of the material. Here’s how it can help you:

• Increased engagement during lectures: Because you aren’t scrambling to copy everything down, you can actually listen and think critically about what the lecturer is saying.
• Better retention: Writing notes in your own words helps you understand the material as you go along, which makes studying later much easier.
• Faster exam prep: Your notes are already organized, so you can jump straight into studying rather than wasting time making study materials.

This method also makes it easier to identify the most important concepts. Lecturers design their slides and lectures to highlight key material, and by focusing on what they emphasized, you can prioritize what you need to learn.

Tips for Exam Prep

This note-taking method doesn’t just help during lectures—it’s a game-changer for exam preparation. Here’s how to use your notes to study:

1. Organize by topic: For some subjects, grouping notes by week made sense. For most though, group them by topic (e.g., glaciers, deserts, earthquakes). This makes it easier to focus on specific areas during revision.
2. Review regularly: Skim your notes weekly to keep the material fresh in your mind, so you’re not cramming at the last minute.
3. Search and highlight: Since your notes are digital, you can quickly search for keywords and highlight important sections for review.

Why Most Note-Taking Fails

When I first started university, I thought taking notes in class was as simple as writing down what was on the lecture slides. But I quickly realized this was a huge waste of time. Instead of listening to the lecturer and understanding the material, I was frantically copying words and leaving class feeling frustrated and confused.

That all changed when I started preparing my notes before class.