3 Clever Ways to Study With Your Notes 📓

Most students worry about how to take notes, not how to use notes. A few weeks ago, I went over different note-taking methods, such as the outline method, mind maps, and the dreaded Cornell notes.

More important than how you take notes, however, is how you use your notes to study for exams. Today, I’ll cover three methods, the last of which is a game changer.

Let’s dive in!

The Feynman Technique

The premise here is simple: pretend to teach the material someone else. Doing so forces you to digest complex topics and synthesize them in your own words.

Here are steps:

1. Review your notes for a particular topic.

2. Pretend to teach this topic to a young child.

3. Whenever you get stuck, note down your knowledge gaps.

4. Return to the literature to refine your understanding.

The Feynman Technique leverages active review instead of passive review.

Passive review is what most students resort to the night before an exam. It involves re-reading notes, highlighting course materials, and watching lecture recordings. While this form of studying feels productive, it doesn’t test nor solidify your understanding. Rather, it leaves you with an inflated sense of confidence that’s in for a rude awakening come exam time.

Active review, on the other hand, is more uncomfortable but significantly more effective. Instead of scanning your class materials at face-value, you test your understanding. For example, the Feynman Technique tests both your ability to recall concepts and to distill them as well.

If you’re short on time, however, I have a slightly easier form of active review that you can leverage…

Blurting

This one’s a community favorite. Every time I post about this method, y’all seem to love it.

Blurting is a technique to memorize your notes. Here’s how to you can “blurt” before an exam:

1. Review your notes.

2. Put them away.

3. Write down everything you can remember on a separate sheet of paper.

4. Pull your notes back out and identify any points you missed.

5. Add them to the sheet of paper using a different-colored pen.

This method has its pros and cons, however. Although it’s an easy form of active review, it’s a shallow form of active review. It’s nothing more than a clever way to memorize your notes and fails to establish the deep understanding you might obtain through the Feynman Technique.

Do I think blurting should still be part of your study toolkit? Of course. But it shouldn’t be the centerpiece. Use it as a way to brush up on your understanding instead of learning the fundamentals.

NotebookLM

Alright, and the third method brought you by this week’s sponsor of the Studious Student—Google!

Now that I think about it—this one might be the community favorite. NotebookLM is an AI-powered note-taking tool by Google. You can use it to summarize your notes, search through course materials, and even turn your notes into an AI podcast.

It’s remarkable how realistic it is. The AI podcast sounds like two real people having an in-depth conversation about your notes. It’s a fun and fresh way to review key concepts before an exam, and one that I wish more students knew about.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Open up NotebookLM.

2. Click on “Create New” under “My Notebooks.”

3. Drag and drop your course materials: notes, lecture recordings, assignments, etc.

4. Click “Generate” under “Deep Dive Discussion.”

The best part? NotebookLM is completely free! You can use it to create notebooks with up to 50 sources and generate up to three AI podcasts in a day.

If you upgrade to NotebookLM Plus, however, you can generate up to 20 AI podcasts and create notebooks with up to 500 sources! And lucky for you, there’s a little treat…

Hope these techniques come in handy as you prepare for your upcoming exams.

See you next week!

Best,
Gohar