by Cal Newport
Part Two will teach you, in essence, how to shoot an academic jump shot. It covers the nuts and bolts of smart exam preparation—the many small techniques, refined by straight-A students over countless semesters, that add up to a much better way to study. Forget everything you think you know about preparing for exams, and approach the steps that follow with an open mind. Some of this advice will make immediate sense, some will seem obvious, and some will surprise you. But just remember that these tactics are not arbitrary, they are not based on one guy’s experience, and they certainly are not abstract theories spouted by some self-proclaimed expert. Instead, they are the realistic strategies developed by real straight-A students to ace tests under the harsh demands of a college workload. If you combine these tested study skills with the time-management techniques taught in Part One, you will find yourself scoring higher, learning more, and studying less than you previously thought possible.
Quizzes vs. Exams
In general, all of the advice described in Part Two will work for both quizzes and exams. But in the case of quizzes, it’s not always necessary to put in quite as much effort (though it certainly doesn’t hurt).
But first things first—let’s get our definitions correct. Keep in mind that professors often use the terms quiz and exam interchangeably, so forget what they say and make your own determination about a given test. Here’s a simple rule to follow: If the test is worth less than 15 percent of your final grade, it’s a quiz; otherwise, it’s an exam. If the test is worth only 5 percent or less of your grade, designate this a tiny quiz.
Don’t spend too much time on tiny quizzes. Even if you fail one, it still probably won’t change your final letter grade. And if you’re attending classes and keeping up with your reading, you should be able to score above average with little to no preparation.
For larger quizzes, you can more or less follow the advice in this section as written, but feel free to move more quickly through the review-focused steps (Steps #3 and #4). If you don’t master every last topic that might be covered on a quiz, that’s okay. A missed question here or there won’t make a big difference on your final grade. And if you treat every quiz like a midterm, you’re going to overload your schedule. Quizzes are checkups, not comprehensive evaluations, so treat them as such.
The only exception, of course, is if your grade is in danger. If you’re in academic trouble, perhaps due to a poor performance on a previous exam or paper, then go all out in your review. If you apply the full force of the study strategies that follow, you will be guaranteed to knock any quiz out of the park.
Step 1
Take Smart Notes
First things first: Always go to class! The importance of this rule cannot be overemphasized. It doesn’t matter if your class meets at 6:00 A.M., at the top of the steepest hill on campus, on Saturday mornings—wake up, get dressed, and get to the lecture on time. As Lydia, a straight-A student from Dartmouth, explains, if you skip class, “it’ll take twice as long studying to make up for what you missed.” This is why class attendance is so important. Not because learning is power, or it’s what your parents would want you to do, but because it saves you time. If you attend class regularly, you will significantly cut down on the amount of studying required to score high grades. Don’t make this negotiable. Even if you’re tired, hung over, or extremely busy, find a way to make it there.
Of course, just going to class isn’t enough by itself. To reduce your study time, you have to also take good notes once you’re there. Keep this in mind: Note-taking is an art form. Doing it well requires expert guidance, and fortunately there is no better place to look for expert guidance than real straight-A students. Here are their proven note-taking strategies.
Gather the Right Materials
When I was a freshman, less than half of my class brought a laptop to campus. The year I graduated, over 95 percent of incoming freshmen brought laptops. By the time you read this, laptops will more or less be the de facto standard for undergraduates across the country, and this is a great advancement for the cause of collegiate note-taking. Why? I think David, another Dartmouth student, put it best: “Use your laptop. Seriously! You will be overwhelmed by the quality and legibility of your notes…it’s really a no-brainer.”
Yes, it may seem somewhat geeky. But it’s becoming increasingly common, and besides, the academic advantages far outweigh any minor social stigma. As mentioned by David: You type much faster than you write, so the laptop will allow you to record more points in more detail. This increased detail and readability will make it easier to study come test time—and that should be all you need to hear.
If you don’t have a laptop, then make sure you have one notebook for every class and a pen that you are comfortable with. Try to write clearly. You might even consider typing summaries of your notes at the end of each week. I sometimes followed this strategy in my pre-laptop days, and found that it saved me significant study time in the long run.
There is, however, one obvious exception to this laptop rule: For math, science, economics, and engineering courses that are heavy on numbers and equations, pencil and paper are acceptable. Some people are comfortable approximating complicated mathematical symbols on their laptop, while others are not. If you fall into the latter category, don’t worry about using a notebook; for a technical course, the difference between the two mediums is less important.
Finally, you should also have one folder for each class. Every piece of paper you receive during a lecture—outlines, assignment descriptions, reading excerpts—should be dated and put in this folder. The same goes for graded problem sets and papers. The folders will make it much easier to find materials when you need them later for review.
A lot of “experts” recommend needlessly complicated additions to this basic material list. They talk of using multiple colored pens, special notebooks, and organized class binders equipped with portable three-hole punches. Real straight-A students ignore this nonsense. As Anna, a straight-A Dartmouth student, warns: “A lot of students focus on making their notebooks look pretty and then forget about the content.” Put your notes on your laptop and your loose papers in a folder, and you’ll be fine.
Take Smart Notes in Nontechnical Courses (What’s the Big Idea?)
A “nontechnical course” refers to any course outside of math, science, economics, and engineering. We’re talking about English, history, psychology, political science, anthropology, classics, education—basically anything that doesn’t make frequent use of mathematical formulas. These courses are the domain of ridiculously long reading assignments and dignified professors lecturing from behind a podium.
The key to doing well in these courses is straightforward: Identify the big ideas. That’s what it all comes down to. Exams in nontechnical courses focus entirely on big ideas—they require you to explain them, contrast them, and reevaluate them in the light of new evidence. If you are aware of, and understand, all of the big ideas presented in the course, these tasks are not so difficult, and strong grades will follow.
As you would expect, lectures are a major source of these big ideas. Identifying them, however, is not a trivial task. Professors ramble. And they rarely start a class by clearly identifying the big ideas that will be explored. Instead, they tend to dive right in, leaving the poor student to separate on his own the interesting conclusions from the digressions.
“A whole lot of superfluous things are said in each class,” explains Jeremy, a straight-A student from Dartmouth. “You have to learn how to pick out which is which.” This is hard, and as such, most students don’t take very good notes in nontechnical courses, which has major ramifications when it comes time to study. If your notes don’t already clearly identify the big ideas, then you are going to be forced to try to figure them out from scratch while reviewing. Allow me to spoil this particular ending for you: Unless you set aside dozens of hours to prepare, you’re not going to accomplish this task, and y
our grade on the exam becomes a crapshoot. If the exam happens to ask questions that deal with the random assortment of ideas that you do know, then you might do okay, but if it happens to ask questions that deal with many of the big ideas that you never learned, then you will do poorly.
Obviously, you want to avoid this situation. The solution is to figure out how to take notes that clearly identify and explain all of the big ideas that are presented so that you can review them later without spending any extra time. Let’s jump right into the details of how to accomplish this goal.
Format Your Notes Aggressively
When you first arrive at the classroom, date your notes and record the title of the day’s lecture, if it’s available. If you’re using a laptop, create a separate notes directory for each class. Save your document in this folder with the date in the file name. This will make it easier to organize the material when you review.
When it comes to formatting the text itself, the basic rule to follow is that anything that makes the information easier to read is fair game. You don’t need a consistent scheme. Don’t be afraid to use aggressive text formatting to help emphasize important points. On a computer, smart students often make use of bold fonts and lists to help organize their thoughts. When using a pen and paper, underlining, indentations, drawing boxes around ideas, and bullet points also help structure the information. If you’re defining a word, make it bold. If you’re writing down an exception to the last observation you recorded, start with: “HOWEVER:…” Christine, a straight-A Harvard student, suggests that you “develop your own shorthand—‘esp.’ for ‘especially,’ ‘N.A.’ for ‘North America,’ etc.” Skip lines with wild abandon, use tabs freely, change the font size, write entire sentences in all caps, throw around asterisks like penny candy—have fun and do whatever helps you visualize the important concepts.
“Your notes are for you and you alone,” explains Lee, a straight-A Columbia student. “They don’t have to make sense to anyone else.”
Capture Big Ideas by Using the Question/Evidence/Conclusion Structure
The central challenge to note-taking in nontechnical courses is deciding what to write down. Some students attempt to record the lecture verbatim. Don’t do this. “The best advice I can give on note-taking,” explains Doris, a straight-A student from Harvard, “is not to try to write down everything the professor says, because that is both impossible and counterproductive.” Put simply: You can’t write that fast! And you will end up expending too much energy capturing exact words as opposed to identifying big ideas. Instead, remember the following structure:
Question
Evidence
Conclusion
Most big ideas in nontechnical courses are presented in this structure. Why? Professional academics think in terms of questions. This is how they see the world. To them, in order to find big ideas, you must first find questions and then follow a path of evidence to a corresponding conclusion.
Accordingly, this is also how professors lecture. They offer up questions and then walk you through various pieces of evidence en route to an interesting conclusion. You should take advantage of this reality by recording all your notes in a Question/Evidence/Conclusion format.
The basics of this approach are simple. All of the information you write down during class should be associated with a well-labeled question. Each question should be paired with a well-labeled conclusion. When you’re done, your notes for a given lecture should consist only of a bunch of question/conclusion pairs, each separated by points of evidence that support why the conclusion is a reasonable answer to the question. In other words, your goal is to fit all the facts and observations spewed out during class into this nice simple structure.
Keep in mind that professors don’t always state the question. Often they jump right into the evidence and leave it to you to deduce the question being discussed. Don’t be afraid to jot down “QUESTION:” and then leave the rest of the line blank as you begin recording evidence. Once you figure out what the professor’s talking about, you can go back and fill in this blank.
The same holds true for conclusions. Professors will sometimes hint at a conclusion but not come right out and present a neat endpoint for the current discussion. In this case, it will be up to you to synthesize the question, evidence, and professor’s hints into a conclusion of your own. This is the important part. When you formulate a conclusion, you are cementing a big idea. If you can’t finalize a conclusion before the professor moves on to the next question, simply jot down “CONCLUSION:” and plan to come back later during a lull in the lecture, or immediately following class, to fill in the blank.
Something to remember: Conclusions are rarely simple. Professors often offer conclusions that only summarize the complexity of the issue. Consider, for example, the following question from a literature class: “Who was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century?” A simple conclusion might be: “Hemingway.” And the evidence, in this case, might be several points highlighting the influence and originality of Hemingway’s work. On the other hand, it’s much more likely that a college professor would offer up a more complicated conclusion to this question, perhaps something like: “Different generations answered this question differently, depending on the prevailing social issues of their time.” In this case, the evidence could be excerpts from scholars of various periods talking about their favorite novelists, as well as some observations concerning the differing social climates during each of these eras.
The more classes you take, the better you will become at summarizing a complicated conclusion. In the beginning, don’t be afraid to ask questions to help figure out if your conclusions are correct or not. If you’re shy, go up to the professor after class or become a regular during his office hours. Professors love this kind of student interaction. Use it to help polish your conclusion-sleuthing skills.
Another important tip: Take full advantage of lulls in the lecture. As hinted above, some professors shoot out information so fast that there doesn’t seem to be enough time to jot down every question or think about every conclusion. Sometimes it takes all of your energy just to keep up with the evidence. In this case, wait for slow spots. When the professor wanders off on a personal anecdote, or a student interrupts with an inane question, use this time to hurriedly go back and clean up what you have been throwing down. Record conclusions, clarify questions, and add illustrative formatting to pieces of evidence. If you’re not rushed, spend five minutes after class to polish your notes before packing up. As Doris from Harvard explains: “It’s important to read over your notes right after class to absorb them and make corrections and additions, otherwise you’ll be susceptible to entirely forgetting what was covered that day.” These little moments and adjustments will make a big difference when it comes time to review.
Finally, remember that the number of questions presented in a discussion can vary significantly, depending on the class. One professor may spend an entire lecture exploring a single question, whereas another may move through a dozen small questions in the space of an hour. Often, a professor will introduce a major question for the whole lecture and then spend the time exploring smaller questions that help build toward an overarching conclusion. Again, the more classes you take, the more intuitive these structures will become. “If you pay attention to the contours of a professor’s lecture,” explains Matthew from Brown, “you can determine what he feels is important.” Listen for pauses, which usually follow key points, and remember that personal anecdotes are often spun during less important parts of the class.
In general, there is no right or wrong way to break up a particular lecture into question/conclusion pairs, so just find a structure that more or less works. Feel free to mess around with your notes as you go along. Add or remove questions on the fly. If certain evidence doesn’t seem to fit with any particular question, no matter how hard you try, that’s okay, just label it as such. Professors have been known t
o wander. By simply attempting to associate all information with questions and conclusions, you are already a large step ahead of most students when it comes to understanding and internalizing the big ideas.
A Brief Example
Presented below is an excerpt from a real college lecture on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It’s followed by an example of how a straight-A student might take notes on this discussion. Keep in mind that the student here would have probably first recorded the evidence bullet points on the fly and then gone back later to fill in the question and conclusion once he had a better idea of where the professor was heading. Also note that the evidence features a lot of aggressive formatting: It’s split up into lists, with words often bolded and capitalized to emphasize their importance. There is no consistent scheme being applied here. The formatting is just what might come naturally to the student during the heat of the moment, to help him understand and underscore the concepts being presented.
Lecture Excerpt:
The focus of today’s lecture is what is called the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire. The idea that the Roman Empire “fell” to the savage, barbarian hordes has been a popular one ever since the eighteenth century. Edward Gibbon’s book by that title pointed to two causes, in his mind, of Rome’s decline and fall: Christians and barbarians. Sometimes he even confused the two. Gibbon argued that Christianity attracted the least intellectual and most superstitious elements in the empire, and that not surprisingly did the triumph of Christianity in the Empire coincide with the downfall of Rome. Christians, according to Gibbon, undermined with their ideas of forgiveness and mercy, the severe patriotic virtues of the Romans that had enabled them to resist heroically the barbarian invasions. Rostovsteff and Toynbee had a similar argument, but instead of blaming the Christians, they looked for social and political causes. Both argued that sometime in the third century, the Roman ruling elite lost its political and intellectual nerve and allowed lesser elements to take over who were much less capable of holding the empire together under the onslaught of barbarians.