
How to Study (2016) - colobas
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/howtostudy.html
======
projektir
Ideas on "how to study" in the context of an educational environment fail on
the outset because that environment is often the greatest influence that you
really can't control.

Studying ability often becomes a factor of prior exposure, time availability,
fluid intelligence, mental stability, and a bunch of other random factors that
all need to align reasonably well. For a small fraction of the population,
these things will align. For any given person, they're not going to align all
that well. For some people, they're not going to align well at all, and they
may not make it.

What ends up happening is that the person can't truly properly keep up, so
they end up surviving instead. And they may succeed in doing just that, but
learning will be damaged. Most studying techniques fall short because they do
not properly account for this survival mode and are not really the techniques
that help someone, well, survive.

Proper learning is not rushed and hyper competitive, but what the average
student encounters is.

Taking very dense notes, for instance, can easily backfire if it takes too
much time and if it's not truly needed. Knowing what to learn, how to learn
it, what not to learn, etc., are all separate skills, and not everyone has
them. And it's not something that can easily be summarized because it's more
of a skill than a piece of knowledge, and most of it comes down to _your_
personal strengths as well as weaknesses.

There are plenty of successful students who have broken all of these rules and
I'm sure we all know a few.

~~~
dhimes
Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely
things you can do to deal with that environment. The environment isn't random;
in fact, it's been honed for quite some time.

You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and
weaknesses. What works for me won't work for you and vice versa. Moreover,
what works for me with math won't work for me with psychology.

But there are things that are more valuable to do than other things simply
because of the way brains work. Rewriting notes, for example, is a waste of
time. _Re-organizing_ notes, however, is priceless.

This is one professor doing his best to help, and I appreciate that. But there
is better information out there.

~~~
projektir
> Despite the fact that you can't control the environment there are definitely
> things you can do to deal with that environment.

That's not really how things like this work. Competitive, live-or-die
environments will always have a group that will not be able to survive those
environments. It's in the definition. If you create an environment which
requires a near-perfect alignment of factors, there will be many people who do
not have that alignment and those people will be at risk.

> You are quite correct that students have individual styles- strengths and
> weaknesses.

And some people have more weaknesses than strengths. For those people to
survive, they need to have access to something other people do not, which is
unlikely.

Professors should stop trying to help, and should instead ask struggling
students, as well as students who used to be struggling but stopped, and vice
versa. But I've never really seen anyone listen to a struggling student,
they're usually just labeled lazy and ignored. Advice on studying coming from
people who likely had very little issues with it due to the good alignment of
factors is near-useless to people who do not have such an alignment. It's much
easier to do your homework every time when you can quickly understand the
material due to prior exposure or good fluid intelligence. It's a different
story when it takes you 5 hours to solve problem #1 and there are 10 total.
Something's gotta give.

Advice on how to study better is not needed. Studying better requires time, a
nurturing environment, time, good pedagogy and/or structure, and time. It is
known, it's just not done, because it's not the priority. There are
techniques, yes, and different approaches, but they themselves require time to
figure out, and time can smooth over such problems. When you take away time
from people, you must admit the goal is less about teaching people something
and more about trying to figure out who to toss aside. And you will notice
also that in such an environment, the students can get better at studying all
they want, and the filter will just get more stringent and narrow. The problem
is the environment. If you ignore the environment, all you will see is better
and better coping strategies combined with a mysterious lack of improvement of
the overall situation.

And this is coming from someone who had it pretty all right compared to some
people I knew.

~~~
mbarq
Really appreciate your self awareness. I come from a lower-middle class
family. I sleep on a couch in a small crowded house with a 3y/o niece
constantly screaming at the top of her lungs.

The libraries near me are all really just rec-centers, my uni is a 70min bus
ride away, so having a place to just "study" is incredibly difficult.

I still manage, but I can only imagine what having one's own roon must be like
and the time saved from travelling to and from school...such is life.

Thanks for the reply, puts into words a lot of what I've been thinking about
lately.

~~~
dhimes
I wish I had an answer for you. To ease distraction you might want to try
"brown noise." I use my mynoise.net (I'm not affiliated- I probably found it
in a thread here on HN.) I also have some "nature" mp3s like ocean waves
crashing and rainfall and such. It's remarkable how well it gets me in "the
zone."

One word of caution: don't turn up the volume to drown out the background
noise. You only need to be able to hear the brown noise, not overwhelm
everything else. I did that and my hearing was off for a day and a half. I
think that because the sound energy is distributed more evenly throughout the
spectrum you're getting more intensity on your eardrum than you think.

------
jaddood
I disagree almost completely with the article. From my experience, it is
almost always an over complication of learning to study a lot at home and to
take notes in a special way or whatever.

What you should do, in my opinion, is to focus almost exclusively on the ideas
explained and try in any way to oppose them, when you find something you feel
shouldn't be how it is, ask. The mere exploration of the concepts gives deep
understanding of them and will require you almost no extra work at home. Often
it will literally need no extra work at all. Also, when the teacher answers
your question, you will get even deeper insight and so will the teacher
(especially when it comes to higher levels of teaching) and most other
students who care to learn. Jotting down notes is a nice way to force yourself
to formulate the ideas yourself, if you don't already do so, but most often,
these notes needn't and shouldn't be read. They should just be written down.

~~~
Clownshoesms
I agree, this bit struck me:

"The key idea of taking good notes in class is to write down as much as
possible."

I guess the post does mention to adapt strategies based on the teacher's
style, but I found (some/most) lecturers I had were just speed-writing on the
blackboards as fast as possible (95 perhaps?), in barely legible writing,
while also explaining the concepts.

My calc & linear lecturers were like a weird, comical race where the lecturers
were master speed-writers with a side of obfuscation, so not only couldn't I
keep up sometimes with the notes, the actual verbal explanation/concepts were
falling by the wayside.

As an aside I had this lady's father for calc:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Crown_Princess_of_Denmar...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Crown_Princess_of_Denmark)

~~~
foobarian
Not that I'm condoning the speed-teaching, but I find that writing down stuff
helps me learn it in a qualitatively better way than just listening to it. It
could be a left-brain kind of thing but it definitely trips some alternate
pathways. I don't need a lecturer to do this necessarily but it's an effective
if expensive forcing function.

~~~
Noseshine
I can very well imagine note-taking helps with _memorization_ , but I can't
imagine that it helps with _concepts_ , with connection the dots. Your mind
has to be able to wander freely for that, when you are busy writing you have
to concentrate on that particular task, which is the opposite of a freely
roaming mind ready to explore ideas and connections. Just my theory, and I'm
certainly biased, since I'm someone who very rarely wrote anything down at
university At school we had to, and looking back the results I got from that
education support my theory. I never had any trouble at school, but getting
good grades and actually caring about the knowledge and connecting it all in
my head didn't happen - only now, decades later, when I discovered online
learning and took over 70 courses by now am I able to connect it all in a
meaningful way. No, I certainly don't have a good opinion about note-taking as
a basis for gaining knowledge. The results are too narrow, I think.

What I found that helps - which unfortunately doesn't scale very well given
how much students have to learn in a given time - is to _teach others_. Become
a TA. Answer other people's questions, explain stuff. It may be an individual
thing, I always work better that way in all parts of life - doing things other
people need, I don't have a lot of questions myself and I do much better under
this system.

------
drenvuk
I've found that the best way to learn something is to play with that thing.
Doesn't matter if it's an essay, a sentence, a formula, a function, an
algorithm, or whatever. The most essential thing is to play with it. Turn it
around in your head, try to apply it to different circumstances - even ones
where it would seem nonsensical. Everything is just a block or piece of
knowledge in a certain shape waiting for you to see if you can fit it into
some random kinda-round hole you found.

I feel like people approach higher levels of education more like a job than
like a game to master. It's all the same.

~~~
dhimes
I love the way you put this. Yes: the hurdle to get over is to get the
information organized in your brain in a way that you can retrieve it. Playing
with it is a great way to do that! Also: making concept maps, Venn diagrams,
tables and so on.

------
waderyan
I enjoyed this article and this subject. A small anecdote to share.

I had a B average after my freshman year. During the break, I had dinner with
a university professor. I asked him how I could improve my grades and he
shared the following points of advice.

1\. On the first day of class observe the students who ask intelligent
questions and are engaged. Sit by and study with them.

2\. Finish small assignments a day before the due date and large assignments a
week before. This is a forcing function to 1) manage your time effectively
(referenced repeatedly in the article) 2) befriend your TA's and professors.

This advice helped me improve my grades and I felt a massive lift in my
learning ability.

~~~
sevensor
With regard to (1), absent any other signal, try to sit near the front of the
lecture hall. You can bet the students who seek out the back rows are not the
most engaged with the material.

~~~
Noseshine
Also gives you bonus points with the professor, simply because they can't help
notice that you did that and even subconsciously getting closer signals
interest. My very first exam grade when I started studying CS (25 years ago)
was an "A" with a very strict professor who rarely gave anything better than a
"B" on a theory-heavy (algorithms) subject - who could have known nothing at
all about me, only that I seemed to actually be interested in what he had to
say because I always sat in the front. I don't think the oral exam itself was
responsible, because there were few hard questions, it was more a back and
forth talk about things not even the core subject of the lectures. I think he
would have asked more actual questions to people he thought he knew less
about. So I think I already entered the exam with a significant bonus.

------
pragone
This is a fascinating subject that I've spent an inordinate amount of time
thinking about, as I've continually tried to improve my studying habits in
these first two years of medical school.

There's some great points here. One for discussion that I'd disagree with is
copying your notes. Here in medical school, it's literally temporally
impossible to copy your notes and actually get to all the material. It's
definitely an extremely effective way to learn the material, but unfortunately
when you have so much material in so little time, it's just not feasible
(FWIW, an average semester has 25 credits of courses for me).

I'd also add in spaced repetition studying - this has been an extremely
effective method of studying for me, and I've learned more via spaced
repetition studying of previously made flashcards than I have from reading the
textbooks. And it does a phenomenal job of isolating the material you need to
know from what you already know.

~~~
Noseshine
After a CS degree (2 decades ago) and many hundreds of hours and courses on
medical topics over the last few years, I think studying medicine and fields
like engineering or math are _very_ different though, and what works in one
may not be the best idea for the other. A lot of memorizing in medicine, like
neural pathways, (bio)chemical pathways, location of nuclei in the brain,
anatomy (of course), regulatory circuits. You learn everything to "debug" one
concrete instance of a biological being, and although variations exist in
comparison to all that could be (or even what there is, looking at all
animals) it's very little, and it doesn't change (beyond the inherent
variation, which only seems great because you are looking at _only_ humans so
any deviations appear greater than they are without the perspective of "all
possible biological systems" for comparison).

Engineers learn existing systems - and many kinds of them - to be able to
create new ones. Medical doctors instead work on only one already existing
systems. Engineers can experiment and fail, many times. Medical doctors should
"do no harm" first of all. So that limits the creativity and determines how
you learn from the outset. Therefore which methods work will also be
different.

~~~
pragone
Having studied both at this point, I'd agree. I think most of my learning in
CS tends to be experimentation - write some programs, see why they don't work.
Sure, there's some things you need to memorize and understand, but that
knowledge is strongly reinforced through experimentation.

------
red_admiral
The opening sounds to me a bit like "if you have to take a job in order to
afford to be here, then you don't deserve to be here". I doubt that's
intentional but it's not very well written - it sounds like accusing poor
students that their main problem is not needing to be able to afford food and
rent but "not prioritising their education enough".

> If you must work (in order to make ends meet), you should realize the
> limitations that this imposes on your study time.

What exactly is such a student supposed to do with this observation, other
than conclude "education is not for people like me"?

~~~
kerbalspacepro
Get loans? If you cannot justify the loans for a college education, you can't
justify the college education.

------
JusticeJuice
Good article, but I think it's important to change study tactics depending on
the topic - and your own personality.

Eg - when I was studying maths and physics, I found the best thing was to not
take notes in class, but spend all my time trying to fully comprehend the
concept.

When I was studying french, flash cards and memorisation schedules were key to
the hardest part of it - vocab. I'm sure there is a better way to do this
however, I am dyslexic, but I still only scraped through even though I put in
the most effort.

When working on project based assignments (such as design), I found the best
way was to ensure I was fully excited about my idea - that would power me
through. And test early.

Basically - match the method to the subject, and yourself.

~~~
foobarian
When taking advanced math classes/seminars--spend the time listening and
following, unless you're the designated notetaker in which case you do your
darned best to take the best notes possible, and type them up in the finest
Latex fashion.

------
yellow_viper
What's with all the comics?

For anyone who's completed a CS degree, how much studying did you do per
night. I understand working on projects etc can eat up hours but I don't
really include that.

Back at college just now and starting university in Sept. I had never studied
in my life until college (coasted of natural ability all my life) and I'm
finding it difficult to even spend 1hr a night. (Average mark currently is
80%) 5hrs per night seems insane to me.

When studying I either understand the concept fully and fire through it rapid.
Don't understand it and spend ages figuring it out/trying to find answers
online. Or have no idea, can't find anything in the textbooks/online and
resort to crying in the corner.

~~~
Ologn
> how much time

They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used
that as my guide

> difficult to even spend 1 hour a night

The more abstract and mathematical the class, the longer I know it will last
and I can use it. The more specific classes like learning C++ were immediately
useful.

That said, I did have to kick myself to memorize dozens of species of fungi
and their attributes for my science requirement class.

You never know what will come in useful. English writing class seems like BS?
Not if it teaches you to write documentation, e-mails etc. better.

> can't find anything

I've been there too. It makes me skeptical of these people who say Coursera
etc. will destroy colleges. I can always ask my professor after class or
during office hours.

You're going to be rooting around in your work life as well, so aside from the
class material, you're exercising this skill as well.

~~~
yellow_viper
>They usually say at least three hours study for each hour of class, I used
that as my guide

That would put me at 18hrs of studying a day :/

Due to years of posting nonsense online, English is easy for me (top of the
class). Not looking forward to my 2 science requirements though as thats where
I struggle to concentrate.

~~~
lasfter
I believe they meant three hours _per week_ for each hour of class. So if you
have 6 courses, each with three hours of lecture a week, you'd spend 3x3x6=54
hours a week. That's still pretty rough but that's what happens if you need to
study hard for 6 classes.

------
janwillemb
I wish someone would have taught me how to study at school or in university. I
somehow managed, but I'm still intimidated and slightly panicking whenever I
have to learn/memorize something: I simply don't know how.

~~~
anon_temp_2404
Memorizing is a learnable skill, like anything else. There are lots of tricks
you can use that eventually become second nature. A good starting point might
be the book "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. If you want to
remember names easily check out Harry Lorayne. There's a YouTube video titled
"Harry Lorayne memorizes audience's names" where he demonstrates his
abilities. I started using his method recently and found it works well. But as
with anything else you have to explore and figure out which methods work best
for you. Good luck.

------
morbidhawk
What if learning "how to study" is just a way to distract yourself from
learning the material? Finding a learning process might sound more fun and
creative, but more than likely it will be a big waste of time. Fortunately,
what you'll be learning from your study work is more likely to be useful and
more fact-based than learning how to study, which is primarily opinion-based.

If I was to create a study guide I wouldn't tell the student anything they
should be doing, but rather ask questions that lead them back to their source
material:

* What are you learning about currently?

* Why do you find it challenging?

* Why is it important?

* What is the general idea?

Learning by applying some memorization technique sounds boring to me, in
comparison to curiosity-based learning using socratic/thoughtful questioning.
Instead of responding to study work with a fight-or-flight response, asking
questions allow you to break out of that fearful mindset and start to examine
the topic and as you ask questions about it you'll start to find little bits
of interesting knowledge in it.

------
nxc18
This has a lot of great stuff, but I hereby dispute the 'don't take notes on a
computer' claims.

It is certainly true that typing out notes is generally a bad idea. I have and
can take notes on a computer while basically unconscious and getting no
benefit from them; transcription is easier than and a distinct activity from
taking notes.

However, with pen computing, the computer becomes a very useful note taking
tool. I can write out my notes in OneNote while recording the lecture. If I
miss something or want clarification, I can go back and listen to the lecture,
linked up by time with the notes I took.

I can go back and search my notes - they are useful for quickly reviewing a
topic I may have studied in the past.

I like color coding my notes. I can write in any color, recolor after the fact
if I want a different structure, and generally add multiple channels of cues
for my studying.

Digital ink & paper have potential to replace physical notes without the
negatives of typing.

~~~
dkarl
I certainly hope this happens. It has always been frustrating to me that with
note-taking I have to choose one or the other. I can take handwritten notes to
help me remember, or I can type notes for later reading and searching. There
are aspects to each that I regret losing when I choose the other.

~~~
nobodyorother
If you have the time, choose both: write them out and then review and revise
them as you write them up.

------
almostarockstar
>...25 hours that you should be spending studying at home (or in the library)

>Dividing that 25 hours by those 5 days gives you 5 hours of studying per
night

Haha. Final year PhD checking in. I've never, not in my entire life, never,
done any more than 2 hours study (outside of classes, lectures or labs) on a
single night. My brain would just stop focusing after a couple hours.

Plus, why would you need to study if you focus during classes and actively try
to understand what's going on?

------
otterpro
The article was brief and had some good advice, and it sets the issue straight
of having priority of school over other activities. School is a full-time job
and spending 40 hours/week should be expected. A lot of the advice are also
just common sense.

I also strongly recommend Cal Newport's book "How to Become a Straight-A
Student" ([https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-
Unconvent...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Straight-Student-
Unconventional/dp/0767922719/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)). I've read a lot of books
on studying in college, but I think this one really is one of the best way to
study.

------
madsbuch
The best advice in this article is IMHO in the bottom:

> Well, of course, you don't have to do all of it at once. Try various of
> these suggestions to see what works for you.

For me to learn, I heavily need to motivation. Hence I usually spend a couple
of days pondering before doing anything productive.

------
journeeman
Great cartoons! :D

------
Kenji
I didn't see it mentioned anywhere on this page, but for memorizing, there is
one very important insight. How well you remember something directly
correlates with how interesting and important you find it. As if your brain is
a cache that evicts data based on this priority. If you manage to manipulate
yourself into believing that the study material is very important, you can
memorize incredible amounts of data. Well, the optimal case would be if it's
actually important stuff, of course! If you start thinking "why does this even
matter", the memories instantly start to decompose.

Also, at uni, I learned that taking notes in maths classes is a recipe for
disaster. How come? The mere act of writing down and arranging formulas on my
sheet takes enough thinking power that I can no longer follow the lecture.
What's better, having one single good shot at understanding things, or having
not understood things and the incomprehensible scribbling of your notes also
makes zero sense without the professor's explanation? The former for me. As
long as I know the broad subject names, I can read up on my own.

~~~
linkregister
One way to attend math lectures is to have already read the chapter in the
textbook and attempted to understand it. That way, the lecture addresses the
gaps in your knowledge and you can ask questions.

This time-intensive strategy might be suboptimal in the long run if it reduces
the time available for doing homework / sample problems, which is almost
certainly the most effective way to actually learn the material.

