
The Cornell Note-Taking System - ____Sash---701_
http://lsc.cornell.edu/study-skills/cornell-note-taking-system/
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dhimes
The conversation here from about a month ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946)

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llamaz
I have tried this, and tt's a good pedagogical method for learning-how-to-
learn, but it's inconvenient in practice

I think it's worth learning how to use Anki instead. The key challenge there
is selecting the right level of coarseness, so that it doesn't take forever.
Even if you don't end up reviewing your cards, the act of synthesising
information helps you learn it. Down the line you're able to encode important
information in finer detail.

Contrary to what you might think, this method is especially useful for really
difficult concepts (e.g. in math and physics). Sometimes you sit through a
lecture and have no idea what's going on until you start doing the exercises.
In these cases you might have to use memory as a crutch, to try to memorize
the main ideas (or useful facts) to create the scaffold which you fill in
later.

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ravenstine
They tried to get us to take Cornell notes back in high school. I think they
can work for some people, but I found that it created too much mental
overhead. Seemed to turn me into more of a recording device than a mind
comprehending a lecture. The note-taking style seems to assume a certain
format of lecture, and if a teacher deviates from that then it can be more
confusing than simply taking notes without the extra columns and cells.

That said, I think it's a good idea, but might not be for everyone. Kind of
like how there are different apps like Notion, Trello, Quip, OneNote, etc.,
and while Notion works for a lot of people, some people benefit more from
Trello's boards and cards.

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jerf
In grad school for computer science, after some struggle, I eventually found
that the best thing for me was just to not to take notes at all. Just engage
with the class maximally, and make sure to do the homework relatively soon
after that (maximizing the time between when you cover something in class and
practice it with homework, aka, "waiting until the last minute", is a bad idea
for all sorts of reasons).

Obviously, my plan doesn't work for everyone, or every class (this is a bad
idea for fact-dump classes for me). But certainly after this I tended to look
at everyone's list of "things you have to do to succeed in class" more as a
menu than a proscription. Still do look at a lot of things that way; you can
see it in our industry too, where you can find people telling you just _have_
to use this type of type system or that type of database... yes, thank you for
adding to my menu, but I'll examine that for myself, thanks.

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neodymiumphish
I've been in law enforcement for about 5 years now, the first 3 of which were
spent entirely on felony-level criminal investigations. They teach a great
deal at the federal courses on how to conduct interviews of Suspects, Victims,
and Witnesses, but almost nothing is detailed on how to take notes. When I
conducted these interviews (especially ones that aren't recorded or when I'm
unlikely to have a chance to re-interview someone, such as with Suspects and
Victims), I found that I really needed a methodology of note-taking that
allowed me to set aside questions to ask when the time was right. For example,
if a sexual assault victim is describing the events that led up to the
assault, and mentioned that the suspect sent a message from his phone just
before doing something else, I would want to know (to the best of her
knowledge) what type of phone it was, but I'm not going to stop her in the
middle of telling me the story just to ask that question.

Interestingly, I basically started doing something extremely similar to this
system (although, apparently backwards). My notes always included a line
separating my main notes on the left from my key details and questions on the
right, with the right column only about 3" wide. Ordinarily, I would leave 2
or 3 blank lines after each question so I could fill in the answer the
interviewee provided and it reminded me to look for any blank space on my
notepad before ending an interview (or, in the case of suspects, before asking
more direct questions that may lead to suspect to end the interview before I
got the chance to get answers to more minor questions). Ofter, my "summary"
section would be extremely short and just describe larger timeline changes,
like if a report spans multiple days or locations, I would mark the end of one
incident in the bottom few lines of the page and jump to a new page to take
notes about the next incident.

I'm very curious if this methodology is used by a lot of others as well
(especially in law enforcement), or if I just happened to find one with
remarkable similarity to Cornell's.

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nradov
I question the value of taking notes at all. Of course different people learn
in different ways, and I'm sure some students can benefit from taking notes.
But for me the process of note taking is too distracting. Better to just focus
on the lecturer and really _listen_. Then maybe write a few short notes
afterwards for points not adequately covered in the assigned text.

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atoav
I don’t see a contradiction there. As you said: differnt people learn in
different ways. Just speaking for myself, but I can concentrate _more_ if I
take notes and not less (unless the thing is very visual in nature).

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dogweather
> differnt people learn in different ways.

There's something intuitive about that, but I think the data show the
opposite. We all learn the same way.

[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-
styles-debunked-there-is-no-evidence-supporting-auditory-and-visual-learning-
psychologists-say.html)

~~~
pfranz
I wish to see more research on stuff like this. I believe I've seen similar
studies showing different learning styles were more effective depending on the
topic, not the person.

In my experience, a lot of learning is a back and forth between rote
memorization (like vocabulary) and building concepts/associations. Rote
memorization can also be a lookup table to focus on higher-level concepts--
like memorizing your times tables. Spaced repetition (like Anki) focuses on
rote memorization. Lectures and note taking, like this, are a mix focusing on
concept building while homework is both generally focusing more on rote
memorization.

But there is some difference person-to-person. For example, many people I know
work through things by talking out loud. I struggle with this and feel like I
have to ruminate on my own to flesh out ideas.

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KomradeKeeks
'15 here

I remember having these notes ingrained into my brain in middle school; at
Ithaca, I didn't know a single person who actively used Cornell notes for note
taking. That said, actively engaging and re-engaging with content will help
you build better internal bodies of knowledge on the subject, so you'll retain
the content long after prelims and finals.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Same here. Ithaca schools are just soooo proud of the Cornell note taking
system they taught it to us as if it was eternal and essential, but ultimately
useless, just like cursive.

I also went to Cornell and never saw it used or mentioned once.

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arh68
Same! '11, never saw a single person use it. Old prelims > graded psets >
notes, to me anyways.

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0kl
If anyone else is interested in research on note taking, this is a survey of
the research with citations: [https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-
taking](https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/note-taking)

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there’s been as much research on specific
methodologies (e.g. Cornell method), but it may also be the case that the
methodology doesn’t matter at all, only that the strategies are employed.

I’m surprised it doesn’t mention the encoding and external storage paradigm,
but [https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/node/31875](https://www.cc-
seas.columbia.edu/node/31875) has some additional context for anyone that
wants some vocabulary and a very short “methods” and “strategies” document.

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btrettel
> Unfortunately it doesn’t look like there’s been as much research on specific
> methodologies (e.g. Cornell method), but it may also be the case that the
> methodology doesn’t matter at all, only that the strategies are employed.

I recall that in the book Your Memory by Ken Higbee he said that various
study/notetaking methods don't differ much and just combine strategies that
are known to work. So he picked a popular system to recommend to readers:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R)

You can immediately see similarities between SQ3R and Cornell Notes.

~~~
Bartweiss
I've heard both teachers and education researchers argue that once you
understand an idea and represent it competently, repeated exposure is the
_only_ thing that matters for learning.

If people who are using a specific technique get better results, it's probably
just survivorship bias, because _everything_ in education is survivorship
bias. Even if people who adopt the technique all do well, it's probably just
selection bias on the sort of people who seek out new study techniques. And if
you teach it to students and they improve, it's probably _still_ the Hawthorne
effect, with novelty and optimism meaning it gets used more consistently at
first.

There are a few pretty miraculous results, but they're mostly on memorizing
lots of completely arbitrary info (e.g. memory palaces). Outside of that, it
seems like picking anything easy to use and being consistent is the winning
approach.

(I'd allow a special exception for things like Anki: if one tool supports data
relationships another doesn't, it can obviously be better for learning that
sort of content.)

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DailyHN
GTD turned me on to notecards. I can't imagine going back. No matter how you
want to organize the important stuff, the ephemeral nature of 3x5 notecards
helps me get more ideas out of my head than ever before.

"Your brain is for having ideas, not remembering them."

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Multiplayer
What do you do with the note cards? I love note cards, but now I just have
stacks of them filling boxes.

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kd5bjo
Write the topic of the note on the index line, and store them sorted. If a
card connects multiple topics, pick one and make cross-reference cards that
point to the topic with the actual note.

The act of filing new notes will force you to at least glance at your old
ones, which can generate serendipitous mental connections. You'll also see
when you have multiple cards covering the same topic, which helps to link
disparate facts about the same thing together in your head.

~~~
DailyHN
Yes, filing the notecards is essential.

Something I try to do is keep my physical notecard files small. Besides the
inbox file, urgent and important notecards are the only ones I keep in a
physical file.

It's surprising how fast you can go through a thousand notecards. So effective
filing is a must. And for me, that means maintaining digital archives.
Something that, on its own, is a whole topic for discussion. Once again, I
recommend GTD by David Allen if you'd like to dive deeper and avoid
reinventing the wheel.

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kd5bjo
GTD's a wonderful system for keeping track of things you should be doing, but
I find his filing system for everything else to be a bit lacking. I've
supplemented it with ideas from _The Card Index System_ ¹, traditional library
card catalogs, and Umberto Eco's recommendations in _How to Write a Thesis_.
At the moment, my card index fills most of my center desk drawer. It may
outgrow that soon, but I have no intention of culling it down; it's quite
literally an index into my own memories, to help me remember things.

¹
[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.216804/page/n7)

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DailyHN
Yes, I agree that GTD isn't a one-size-fits-all solution.

David Allen, in GTD, recommends an alphabetized system. Something that I don't
do because all of my reference material is digitized and easily searchable.

Search-ability is the primary reason I avoid keeping a large physical file
system.

I take inspiration from multiple books written about productivity and
organization. Other books that have been highly influential in my systems are:

\- Principles (Dalio)

\- The ONE Thing (Keller)

\- Organize Tomorrow Today (Selk, Bartow)

\- Productivity Planner (more of a journal than a book)

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kd5bjo
Interestingly, it's the lack of searchability that made me gravitate towards a
physical system. It forces me to think about the situations I may find myself
in when I'll want a piece of information, in order to file it in the correct
place.

This has the odd effect that I'm more successful at finding things in my paper
system than I ever was with an electronic one, though it's probably of little
use to anyone else. I also find that flipping through the notecards to file or
look up something serves as a pretty good idea-generation engine.

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sakras
They made us on several different occasions take Cornell notes saying they'd
help us learn. Supposedly there were numerous studies saying that students
that used them succeeded. I HATED taking these notes - it just makes more
sense to me to format things as a textbook-writer would. I think of my
notebooks as mini-textbooks.

On a more general note, I've noticed throughout my undergrad experience that
whenever some lecturer/Professor/TA comes up and says they read a study about
"evidence-based learning" and that this method will help us learn 10x better,
they're full of shit. I want nothing more than to take notes however I want,
to a lecture.

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vsyu
It can be helpful to have a structured system of note-taking that you can
modify so that it's customized to your needs and becomes most effective for
how you learn.

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Dirlewanger
I imagine this would be OK for a structured maths class, but not for a weekly
3 hour history seminar where the professor pontificates non-stop for the
entire time...

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criddell
What's a better way to take notes for that case?

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tra3
Any tips for taking meeting notes specifically?

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blowski
I use what I know as the the "Bill Gates method". Separate things into:

* important points

* questions to ask, either during the meeting or afterwards. If it gets answered during the meeting, I put the answer under 'important points' and cross out the question.

* things for you to do after the meeting

* any commitments others take on which you want to keep track of

I do this by entering them on different areas of the page, others use
different symbols at the beggining of the line (?, !, *, @).

As soon as I finish the meeting, I share the notes with everybody.

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throw0101a
> _I use what I know as the the "Bill Gates method"._

Is there a good description/explanation of this?

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blowski
I read years ago that this is how Bill Gates takes notes, but I don't remember
where I read it. It wasn't much more detailed than my comment here.

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orbitmech
Yes

