How to Take Notes in College: Pick the Method That Fits Each Class

Midterm season is here, and for most classes the notes you took in September are the main thing you will study from. If they are a wall of copied slide text, you'll spend your review time deciphering them instead of learning from them.

This guide covers how to take notes in college class by class: the four methods worth knowing and the course types each one suits, what the research on laptops versus paper really shows, how notes from a textbook differ from notes in a lecture, and the routine that turns a page of notes into exam practice within a day. If your first exam is close, pair it with our 14-day midterm study plan.

What good college notes actually do

A good page of notes does two jobs. During class, writing them keeps you processing what you hear. Afterward, it becomes material you can quiz yourself on. Cornell's Learning Strategies Center puts the test simply: good notes are ones you can actually use (Cornell LSC).

That rules out two common habits. One is trying to capture every word, which turns you into a stenographer. The other is highlighting the textbook and calling it notes: in John Dunlosky's review of 10 study strategies, highlighting failed to help students compared with simply reading, while practice testing was one of the two strategies rated most effective (Dunlosky, 2013). The notes that pay off are short, in your words, organized so you can see how ideas connect, and turned into questions soon after.

Four note-taking methods and when each fits

The University of North Carolina's Learning Center describes the main formats and when they fit (UNC Learning Center). Here are the four that cover nearly every college class.

The Cornell method

Developed by Walter Pauk, a Cornell education professor (Cornell LSC), the Cornell system splits each page into three areas. Cornell's handout draws them to scale: a 2½-inch cue column on the left for questions and cue words, a 6-inch note-taking column on the right, and a 2-inch summary strip across the bottom. It lays out the steps too (Cornell LSC handout):

1. Record the lecture in the right column in short, telegraphic sentences.
2. Question: as soon after class as you can, write questions in the left column that your notes answer.
3. Recite: cover the right column and answer each question aloud in your own words.
4. Reflect: ask how the ideas apply and how they fit with what you already know.
5. Review: spend at least ten minutes every week going back over your earlier notes.

Steps 2 and 3 are why Cornell works so well before an exam: the page arrives with its own practice quiz built in.

The outline method

Headings, then indented subpoints, then details and examples. Outlines suit lectures that follow a clear structure, which is common in history, political science, business and many intro courses where the professor works through a numbered agenda. They break down when the lecture jumps around, so leave white space and fill in the hierarchy after class.

The charting (matrix) method

Draw a table before class with the categories down the side and the features across the top. Charting is built for fact-heavy material that compares things: theories in psychology, drug classes in pharmacology, economic systems, organelles and their functions. Each empty cell is a question you can test yourself on later.

Mapping (concept maps and flowcharts)

Put the main idea in the center or at the top and draw lines to related ideas, labeling each line with the relationship ("causes", "is a type of", "inhibits"). Flowcharts are the step-by-step version. Use mapping for processes and systems: metabolic pathways, the steps of a legal case, an algorithm, a feedback loop.

Which method fits which class

For course-specific study plans built around these notes, see how to study for biology and how to pass statistics.

Laptop vs paper: what the research found

Almost every guide repeats one 2014 study. The full picture is more interesting and more useful.

The original. Across three studies, Mueller and Oppenheimer found that students who took notes on laptops did worse on conceptual questions than students writing by hand. Their explanation: laptop users tended to transcribe the lecture word for word instead of putting it in their own words. They also noted that taking more notes can help (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).

The first replication. Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson repeated the study and added groups using e-writers and a group that took no notes at all. Some trends favored longhand, but performance did not consistently differ between any of the groups, the no-notes group included, and the differences shrank further once students studied their notes. Combining the direct replications gave small, nonsignificant effects favoring longhand, and the authors judged it premature to call either method superior (Morehead, Dunlosky & Rawson, 2019).

The second replication. A team led by Urry repeated Study 1 with 74 laptop and 68 longhand note-takers. As in 2014, laptop notes had more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, but the longhand advantage on the quiz did not appear, and mini meta-analyses of eight similar studies showed the same pattern. In both the original and the replication, writing more words went with higher quiz scores (Urry et al., 2021).

The part nobody disputes. In a simulated classroom, students who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test, and so did students who simply sat where they could see a multitasking classmate's screen (Sana, Weston & Cepeda, 2013).

So the device matters less than what you do with it. Pick the one you'll paraphrase on and not wander off on:

• Typing: close every tab but your notes, turn off notifications, and write summaries, not quotes. If you catch yourself typing whole sentences as the professor says them, stop and compress.
• Paper or a tablet with a pen: better for diagrams, chemical structures, math and graphs. Photograph or scan pages the same day so they live in one place with your typed notes.

If you want the memory science behind "your own words", the free AP Psychology course explains how the brain encodes new memories; intro psychology courses in college cover the same material.

How to take notes in a lecture

1. Skim before class. Ten minutes with the reading or the posted slides tells you the vocabulary, so you can spend class on the explanation.
2. Listen for signals. Write down anything the professor repeats, writes on the board, introduces with "the key point is", or ties to the exam. Examples and worked problems matter more than definitions you can look up.
3. Write the question, not just the answer. "Why does X happen?" with a three-word answer is worth more than a copied paragraph.
4. Mark gaps instead of stopping. Put a "?" next to anything you missed and keep going. Fill it in from the textbook, a classmate or office hours.
5. Use abbreviations you'll still understand on Thursday. Keep a short key at the front of the notebook.

When the professor posts slides

Download them before class and take notes on or beside them rather than copying them. Your job in the room becomes catching what isn't on the slides: the explanation, the example, the "this one trips people up". A slide deck with no handwriting on it is not notes yet.

How to take notes from a textbook

Reading notes work differently because you control the pace. UNC's Learning Center suggests reading a short section, a paragraph or up to a page, then pausing and writing notes from memory of what you just read (UNC Learning Center). That pause forces you to pick out the main idea instead of copying every detail.

A routine for a chapter:

1. Preview. Read the headings, the summary, the bolded terms and the end-of-chapter questions first. The free Pre-Reading Strategies section of The Word on College Reading and Writing shows how.
2. Read a section, close the book, write. A few lines in your own words, plus any term you'd need to define.
3. Annotate lightly. Underline a phrase, write a word in the margin. The course's Active Reading and Annotation section and its free dialectic note-taking demo show a two-column version: the text on one side, your response on the other.
4. Connect it to the lecture. Add a page reference to your lecture notes wherever the book explains something the professor raced through.

For a textbook PDF, the same steps apply. Keep your notes in a separate document rather than as highlights inside the file, so you can review them without scrolling through 40 pages.

What to do within 24 hours after class

The page you wrote in class is half finished. UNC's Learning Center advises revisiting your notes a day or so after class to check them for clarity, fill in definitions and catch concepts you missed (UNC Learning Center), and Cornell's method asks for questions as soon after class as possible. Doing it the same day or the next morning, while you still remember the lecture, takes 10 to 15 minutes:

1. Clean up. Fix anything you won't be able to read, fill the gaps marked with "?", add the textbook page numbers.
2. Write questions. In the margin or the cue column, write three to five questions the page answers: a definition, a why, a comparison, a problem. A biology line reading "competitive inhibitor: binds active site, competes w/ substrate" becomes "How does a competitive inhibitor differ from a noncompetitive one?" (the free AP Biology section on environmental impacts on enzyme function has the answer to check against).
3. Answer them cold. Cover the notes and answer out loud or on scrap paper. Check, and star anything you missed.
4. Summarize in two sentences at the bottom of the page.

The reason step 3 matters: in a classic experiment, students who restudied a passage did better on a test 5 minutes later, but students who had practiced recalling it did much better 2 days and 1 week later, even though the restudy group felt more confident (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). AP Psychology's section on retrieving memories covers why pulling an answer out of memory strengthens it, and the free forgetting-curve simulator lets you pick a review method, such as a minute paper or dialectic notes, and watch how it changes the curve.

Block those 15 minutes on your calendar right after each class or first thing the next day. Our guide to making a study schedule shows how to fit them around everything else.

Can you record lectures in college?

Sometimes, and the rules are your school's, not your own. Policies differ by campus and often by course, so check the syllabus and ask before you press record. Two examples of how schools handle it:

• The University of Iowa says students may record only with prior written permission from the instructor and notice to the class, that students with an approved accommodation give the instructor their Letter of Accommodation, and that sharing or posting recordings is prohibited (University of Iowa).
• NC State's Disability Resource Office offers permission to audio record lectures as an accommodation for students with disabilities who can't take or read notes. The student tells the instructor before recording, the recording is for personal study only and can't be shared without the lecturer's consent, and the instructor may ask the student to sign a recording agreement (NC State DRO).

If you need recordings because of a disability, start with your campus disability services office; it handles the accommodation and the instructor letter. Otherwise, a short, polite request works, and our guide to emailing a professor has a format for it. This is not legal advice: your school's policy and its disability office are the authorities here.

A recording is not a substitute for notes. Listening again takes as long as the lecture did, so use it to fill specific gaps, not to rewatch the whole class. And if you run a transcript or lecture through an AI tool to summarize it, check your course's AI policy first; our post on whether using AI is cheating walks through how to read one.

Common note-taking mistakes before an exam

• Copying slides word for word. The slides are already posted. Your notes should hold what isn't on them.
• Never looking at notes until the week before. By then you can't remember what half the abbreviations meant.
• Rewriting notes neatly as "studying". Recopying feels productive but is mostly rereading. Turn the page into questions instead.
• One method for every class. An outline that works in history will fight you in organic chemistry.
• Notes scattered across apps, notebooks and photos. Pick one home for each class so you can find everything the night you start reviewing.

Lykke's free ready-made courses on Explore include quizzes and flashcards on many intro subjects if you want practice questions beyond your own, and How it works explains how Lykke fits around your classes.