5 Methods for Taking Better Notes and Getting Better Grades

By Christine Ascher on February 19, 2017

Note taking is probably a daily part of every college student’s life. It serves as the foundation for your performance in every class — if you’re not taking good notes, it becomes more difficult to study and your grades may suffer as a result.

While simply copying down everything that your professor says word-for-word can be a suitable means of note taking for some (provided you’re able to keep up), there are many systems that are more effective. Each one emphasizes a different aspect of your lectures — main concepts, relationships, or connections within the lecture content, for instance — and works best for a certain kind of student and learner so you might want to try a few different methods to see what works best for you.

Five of the best methods for note taking are listed below.

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The Sentence Method

The Sentence Method is the most basic form of note taking. According to the Student Academic Services website at Cal Poly, it involves “[writing] every new thought, fact, or topic on a separate line, numbering as you progress.”

This allows you to write down all of the information that your professor covers without having to take the time in class to find relationships or define sequences. However, it also means that your notes are going to be less organized when you look back on them, as you haven’t highlighted major topics and their subcategories.

The Sentence Method tends to work best if your professor is a fast lecturer and you don’t have a lot of time to write. It also leaves you with the opportunity to go back and reorganize your notes later, which means you will have an added opportunity to review important concepts and information.

The Outline Method

The Outline Method is a fairly common note taking strategy amongst college students. It allows you to “[record] content as well as relationships” as you take notes. When using the Outline Method, start with the most general information all the way on the left-hand side of your paper. Put more specific information relating to that topic underneath the first point, indenting to show relationships.

For each piece of information that elaborates on an earlier point, continue to start a new line with an indentation. One downside of this method is that it requires you to pay more attention to relationships and patterns while in class, and may be somewhat difficult to keep organized if the relationships you find do not coincide with the order in which your professor lectures.

However, it will provide a useful and thorough study guide when it comes time for your exam. In general, this system works well for all types of classes except those involving a lot of formulas or graphs, such as math classes.

The Cornell Method

The Cornell Method is a great way to take organized notes that you can easily look back on to find specific points and ideas. In order to use it, you first need to divide your paper into three sections: a 6-inch margin on the right-hand side, a roughly 2 ½ inch margin on the left-hand side, and a section at the bottom of about five or six lines.

During class, take notes in the right-hand section, then fill in main points and concepts on the left. At the end of your lecture, write 2 to 3 sentences at the bottom of each page summarizing the information covered above. This will help you condense all of the information that you went over in class to just the main points, as well as forcing you to review it right away and to take note of what you don’t understand.

When you go back over your notes to study, you can focus most of your attention on the key concepts that you noted on the left-hand side, and on your summaries of each page.

The Mapping Method

Mapping is a system of note taking that illustrates the connections between each of the topics that your professor covers during a lecture. As you take notes, use main topics as headings on your page. Then, write down any subsequent ideas using arrows to illustrate the connections between each topic.

This method requires you to have a decent understanding of lecture content — or at least enough of an understanding that you can see how everything is related. If you’re a visual learner, this can be a great method, as it allows you to clearly see how main ideas and concepts all fit together.

Try using the Mapping Method “when the lecture content is heavy and well-organized.” In some cases, it may be easier to use another method to take notes during lecture, if you’re finding it too difficult to keep up while using the Mapping Method and to go back after your lecture and rewrite your notes using this technique.

The Charting Method

The Charting Method involves creating tables and columns in which to organize your notes. If your lecture is given in a specific format, this can be a great system to use. It’s easiest if you know the information that is going to be covered in your lecture ahead of time and can set up your columns in advance, using the main topics that are going to be discussed as the headings.

Taking notes in this way will make it much simpler when you go back to study, as you can see right away where each topic is covered and can easily review only what you need to study the most. This method is ideal for subject matter that can naturally be broken into categories — for instance, for a history class, you can use this technique to keep track of events, their causes, and their consequences.

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