The Cornell Note-Taking System | Hacker News Reader

The Cornell Note-Taking System

lsc.cornell.edu

The conversation here from about a month ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946

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.

I used Anki for my ML grad (wish I did for undergrad). Formed a card for each subproblem of a problem in a pset, theorem, lemma, general concept, and definition---and for each of these things, using the 20 rules of learning from supermemo (? i think). I also used it for easily grokked things that I wanted to make a habit. Made a deck for each class, and also made a deck for talks and seminars I visited, grouped by semester.

Super useful. I feel like I don't really forget the majority of the vibes like I did for my astro undergrad. I remember GR a lot less than convex opt even though I spent many more hours of rigorous study and even though I revisited my GR material more. Revisiting my astro notes is still effective for those little details, but getting all the context into my working memory is much more exhausting.

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.

I've had this problem with every form of structured note-taking I've ever tried. My focus is redirected to writing everything down and ensuring I'm using the appropriate format like a stenographer, so badly that when the professor asks "Any questions? Does everyone understand this?" I don't know whether I understand - I haven't engaged my brain yet.

Even worse, I have to start wrestling with the format as soon as anything unusual happens. If I miss something, or the professor makes a mistake, or someone asks an important question clarifying that bit 10 lines ago, or the structure of the information isn't linear, I want to be able to bounce around my notes connecting and fixing things in a way that I'll understand later.

Structured systems like Cornell notes work well enough in a slow, perfectly sequential lecture, but everything works there. And I imagine they might probably be good for memorizing completely synthetic content like the rules of an unfamiliar game, where there's not much thought to apply. But for practical notetaking, I think their best use is after the lecture, as a way to convert "get the content down" notes into a study-friendly format.

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.

Thorough note-taking from a live stream is only appropriate when it's impossible to record.

In school, thorough note-taking during lecture is a terrible idea. Only jot down your own questions to follow up on later; don't copy the material. Record the material and replay it later to review.

Note-talking "offline", at your own pace, from a book or a recording, is a great way to build your memory of the material.

I tend to think that, so long as one isn't doing something really odd, most of the value comes from practicing any system at all.

The important thing is the repetition/correction cycle.

It seems like most things taught as note-taking methods are actually study methods. Obviously, the hope is to combine the two and automatically create a study tool, but I think that's usually a mistake.

In practice, the combination seems both difficult and ineffective. Most lectures are not perfectly clear and sequential - they have mistakes, backtracking, and questions. And much lecture content is not linear, especially in the sciences, so you get diagrams that don't naturally break into "read cue, reveal content". Trying to force the lecture into the note format distracts from comprehension, and produces notes that are good for retention but not for learning content you didn't understand. Even if you get past all that, there's a fundamental problem with trying to organize your study material before you know what's on the next slide, and trying to organize questions after writing down the answers.

Anki or any other after-the-fact study format lets you cut past all that. You can take notes fluidly, aiming at low-distraction completeness. And then you can rearrange the content for retention, not lecture-compatibility. Charts and non-linear content can be presented smoothly. Best of all, you can actually study with cues and content in a many-to-many relationship, linking dense info like a ternary diagram to many different prompts.

In many ways, it comes down to the standard writing adage of "know your audience". In the case of notes, that's generally a future version of yourself; knowing how you plan to use the notes in the future will inform their structure now.

My system is constantly evolving as I discover what works for me and not, but it's in a pretty good place right now. Information gets processed in several distinct stages. I start with giving the learning material my undivided attention, whether it's a book, lecture, video, or museum. Shortly afterwards, I record my thoughts and observations in a journal as unstructured prose. This is usually about 2/3 recording things that were presented and 1/3 random connections that came to mind. The important thing is only to record what I actually understand -- if there was a lot of stuff that went over my head, it's a sign that I need to revisit the source material later after I have a better grasp of the fundamentals.

During a weekly review session, I read through all of the journal entries and index them by subject in a physical card file. Each card is headed with the subject, obviously, and the card body has a reference to the journal entry, the source material, and a 1-2 sentences summary about how the journal entry relates to the subject.

At the same time, I also make flash cards to add to my Leitner box (which serves the same purpose as Anki). My goal with these isn't to remember everything, but to keep enough of the subject fresh in my mind that I'll be able to think of the correct subject headings when I want to look information up in the future.

I use physical cards for these because I feel like they're a better serendipity engine than anything electronic I've tried. Whenever you're interacting with the system, you'll end up glancing at a bunch of arbitrary cards unrelated to your current task, and occasionally that'll be the trigger you need for a new idea.

One form of notes that I want to add to this is the long-term reminder. The idea comes from Chris Hadfield¹ and presumably others in the astronaut corps: once you've done the work figuring out how to reduce theory to practice, make a task-focused reference for it that gets filed away if you ever need to do that task again. The goal here is to directly record conclusions: if you are annotating a diagram of a machine, for example, indicator lights should be labelled with the corrective action to take in addition to the parameters that cause them to illuminate.

¹ Masterclass.com; Lesson #17

It sounds like you are implying spaced repetition and the Cornell Note-Taking System are mutually exclusive.

I personally don't like the flow of Cornell's style, so I didn't use it as a student, but SRS software (Anki is still my preferred) didn't replace me needing to take notes and review those after class.

If anything, I would expect your Cornell notes to be a good basis for how you create some of your cards.

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.

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.

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).

There is probably a value in taking notes after a lecture -- repetition and recall is a strong component in memory formation.

In my experience (on both sides of the lectern) there is even more value in taking a few before the lecture.

With typical lecture structure, you get a little review tying in the last subject(s), a little bookkeeping/admin (next week we will...) and then a new topic or topics, followed by some synthesis.

If you've had a quick look at the new topic already, you'll know where your understanding is good and where it isn't. You can pay attention to the right bits, and ask questions if needed.

Review afterward is very useful, but probably more topic-by-topic not lecture-by-lecture. After the lecture you add that material to your ongoing review.

You're not wrong. I just finished reading "Make It Stick" which covers these topics and one of the many examples from college lectures is a student who was doing the readings before the lectures.

As you point out, asking questions is useful, and trying to answer them yourself first is even more so. One student classification researchers have identified is rule vs example learners. Rule based learners seek out rules to learn something, while example learners typically try to memorize examples. Rule based learners tend to do better in scholarly tasks / exams. However, example based learners can be taught to be more like rule based learners with a few hacks: prompt them to compare different examples, instead of reviewing one example at a time, inserting questions into the marginalia / chapter headers, etc.

> 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-...

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.

"We all learn the same" is not the correct conclusion to draw from this report. The only thing this report claims is that all existing studies about differing learning styles are flawed and therefore not reliable.

The actual conclusion, straight from the source you linked:

"But psychological research has not found that people learn differently, at least not in the ways learning-styles proponents claim."

That's not what your link says. The link says no one is a pure visual or auditory learner.

I'm the same as you, although I believe most people are not like us. In fact, I find visual input so distracting that when I'm on a conference call and we're talking about something very complex, I actually close my eyes to listen/concentrate even better. This technique felt like magic when I first discovered it and it still does every time I use it now. Unfortunately, this method isn't socially acceptable in face to face interactions. :)

But, I know my wife does not learn well this way. I also help my kids with their homework every night and I've tried this method with them when they don't understand something -- it doesn't work well for them either. Everybody does learn differently and I wish I learned how I learn best while I was actually in College; I probably could have saved myself a lot of time by not taking notes at all.

I hope there is now, but at least when I transitioned from high school to college, there weren't any simple resources to prepare me for the workstyle adjustments that I should have made. So, I appreciate this article at least in the sense that it is trying to offer students a framework for success. That said, I wish it offered some alternative suggestions for those who can't write notes and "listen" at the same time.

Taking the notes help me learn. I'm also the forgetful type so I have trouble remembering the details of a lecture after the fact.

Writing by hand is slow for me, though, so I found myself paying attention more to the note-taking than the lecture.

Taking notes via laptop was a game changer for me. I could take voluminous notes and keep up with the lecturer. It was wonderful! Not all upside, of course, as laptops come with their own problems, the biggest probably being ease of distraction, but I think it was a net benefit for me.

Record the lecture, so you can replay a high quality copy instead of a badly rushed copy.

I think it's really useless to take notes on what is already written in 1000 other places with much more legibility and coherency. Sometimes I see people with tomes of notes that is basically a duplicate of the textbook, and I can't help wondering that this is just a holdover from the days before the printing press.

I write notes to solidify the idea in memory. Placing the idea in a real space helps me relate the ideas spatially. If I can remember one thing on a page, I can usually remember the rest of the page.

I guess it's the recitation and active recall that helps--not necessarily the writing/typing stuff down on paper itself. I suppose it's also possible to do this by drawing on a whiteboard or...eek...preparing and drilling flashcards.

'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.

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.

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

I remember those back in middle school. My history teacher beat on us relentlessly to do them, to the point of having large stacks of paper with lines down the middle in the room and handing out bundles of the same at regular intervals. No one did it unless she was checking for a grade, which was infrequent. I did well in the class, and neither I nor the other A students took notes this way. Just sometimes wrote in the margins like normal people, or underlined something important, then put these into separate documents. Having a sheet of the synthesized "metadata" (dates, contextual bits, etc.) was much more useful than having to page through to get at the information.

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

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 has some additional context for anyone that wants some vocabulary and a very short “methods” and “strategies” document.

> 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

You can immediately see similarities between SQ3R and Cornell Notes.

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.)

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."

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

I have the same question.

#1 Don't plan on saving the notecards forever.

Put them in an inbox immediately after writing on the notecard.

At a predetermined time, manage the inbox.

Some of my notecards get stored into folders created for current projects. These folders can be digitized at a later date for archiving and searching. Though, most notecards don't make it that far.

Some notecards represent tasks. Those get recycled as soon as they are completed.

Many notecards head straight to the recycling bin. You'd be surprised how often something seems like a good idea before you write it down.

Most of my process follows the "Getting Things Done"(GTD) framework by David Allen. I highly recommend it.

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.

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.

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 System¹, 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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

Any tips for taking meeting notes specifically?

Record everything, ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation. Plug text input into company search engine.

Radical transparency by giving everybody access to this interface.

Awesome bullshit filter.

> ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation

I honestly love this idea. Any suggestions on what FOSS tooling to use for said speech-to-text that's reasonably accurate? Or is training the ML the "heavy lift" of this setup?

Google has an API for this. Speech is a thing you really need big data for and thus IMO not suitable for FOSS. Why bother with setting up the whole custom data pipeline when plug-and-play is available for a fraction of the cost.

https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/

> ML multi-speaker speech-to-text every conversation

Neat idea, do you know of any software that's capable of taking an audio file and producing multi-user text from it? Seems like it would be useful in a wide variety of situations.

Google Speech API see other comment for link has speaker diarization in beta i.e automatic predictions about which of the speakers in a conversation spoke.

On top of this you can add 5000 names for company specific entity recognition for product, people, brand names etc.

120 different languages are supported.

Trint[0] has a wonderful UI/UX for exactly this. I'm not sure if they're using the latest & greatest ML models, but even years ago I was pretty blown away. I still am. It's one of the most "right" products I've seen in this generation of web development. Someone realllllllly cared about the details of UX.

Some of that only comes across when you actually use it - when you clean up the transcription immediately after the meeting or the next day. Clicking a mistake word to edit it snaps the video and audio to that point, so its super intuitive to "scrub" through the video just by clicking around the text transcription. Very fast, very natural, very low effort.

I can only imagine how much it will be improved if it used google's newest multi-speaker transcription models. It always had some trouble whenever people started talking at the same time.

[0] https://trint.com

At $60 per user per month?

Yeah it's way too expensive. I decided that it probably technically is net positive for organizations with a heavy billable hours situation (contract engineering shops) because it can easily save more than $60/mo per person of time/accuracy.

That doesn't mean I was willing to pay $60/mo/pp though, and ended up not.

However, I still think it's the best product in its category right now and given the disappointing state of product design these days, I don't expect anyone to catch up to its interface. I'd love if an open-source group did though.

This is actually a fairly complex problem. You are getting into the field of stenography.

If such a speech-to-text, multi conversation system existed then the field of court reporting/closed captioning would have a real shake up.

>Record everything

You had me here. Companies that do this as a matter of course on their key production lines usually become very, very productive.

Its not to catch worker ethics lapses; its to give the team the ability to understand the causes of their exhaustion, and optimise.

Anyway, done properly, meeting notes and general distribution can give individual members of a group a lot more agency over their participation in that group.

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.

I like this. I've kind of been doing it implicitly but this organization would be much better.

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

Is there a good description/explanation of this?

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.

Sounds a lot like the Bullet Journal method (which I use daily)

* Have a tangentially related person attend and take notes so the main participants can concentrate. Instead of jotting down your own questions, speak them aloud for everyone including the scribe to hear.

If you don't have a dedicated assistant, set up a rotation with your team to scribe for each other.

Only jot down a few brief personal notes for yourself.

I use the bullet journal system to take meeting notes. It's more personal as the things I track are important to me. I try to process information and jot down things I need to remind, my tasks, and add questions to follow up on.

https://bulletjournal.com/pages/learn

As a meeting secretary, you can use a similar process but you have to be mindful and listen actively since you're tracking info for more than you.

Yes

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