The Cornell Note Taking System | Hacker News Reader

The Cornell Note Taking System

lsc.cornell.edu

177 pointsspking78 comments

Ooooooh I have a burning hate for this system (the dislike is rational, the burning part is not entirely rational but justified). Way back in high school my AP history teacher not only taught us this (cool, that's part of his job) and checked that we were able to do it (reasonable), he required us to submit notes in this exact format, for every reading, all year, which he graded. After I determined that my comprehension and retention rate went down as a result of having to constantly interrupt my reading to follow the format, I stopped doing them and he got big mad that I was still doing great on all his tests using my own strategies. With a >90% test average he still gave me a C– in the class and tried to pressure me to cancel my AP exam and take a partial refund for it. I got a 4. (For the non-US folks: that's a 4 on a 5-point scale and generally means it will count for university credit, as indeed it did for me.)

When I visited on a schoolday the next year, he saw me in the hallway and had the tremendous arrogance to ask me to pop into his class and tell them how much the notes helped. I was too unconfident at that point to do more than politely decline to do so, but modern me probably would have accepted the offer and then told the class exactly what I thought of them....

If they work for you, great! But no system is perfect for everyone. Assess what works for you, jettison the stuff that's wasting your time.

ETA: This episode did teach me something very important, which was that as a teacher, when I'm teaching techniques if I think it's important enough I can require students to learn the technique and assess whether they are able to do it, but then I let them decide whether to use it in general or find something better.

My middle school and high school required Cornell notes, and they were a huge pain in the ass. Never used them since.

I'm reminded of a couple of my favorite quotes:

"Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it."

"Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own"

~~ Bruce Lee

That describes a lot of the systems I've encountered perhaps especially in the productivity area such as GTD. Are there some specific good ideas? Yep. Adopt the whole system religiously? That would be a big no.

wow, grading the notes is terrible! If they helped you enough to get a good grade, penalizing you is ridiculous! Conversely if your "bad" notes are why you have a bad grade, knocking it down further seems almost spiteful!

> pressure me to cancel my AP exam and take a partial refund for it

Having done my studies in Europe, I'm wondering how much additional anxiety having this kind of pecuniary questions you can get. Discussing a refund if you fail a course sounds so alien to me

The AP exam is uncoupled from the course and belongs to a different organization. If you fail the school course you probably won’t pass the exam.

My entire school did this. We even got a special notebook thing that had the pages laid out and also had other organizational stuff in it. The notebook and the notes in it were what we got graded on. No homework, no tests, we weren't really expected to study the notes, just take them. There were some other activities that involved the notes though at school, semi regular group and class discussions and we would reference notes. I also seem to remember teachers giving us notes too. Like after our notes from the previous day were graded they would handout a set of notes that were the ideal notes. I actually liked it, we only had 4 classes per day that were 90 minutes each and two of them were non-academic like PE, Band or Autoshop. Then if you were doing poorly you could come in early or late for zero and fifth block which were a 1 hour condensed recap of your previous academic classes. It also wasn't setup by grade so you could have all years in the same class even though most had a majority of one grade. It was a bad school though, an hour to get through metal detectors, ID had to be work facing outward at all times in an acceptable position. There was no being late or tardy either. The doors locked when the bell rang and no one could be in the halls without a security escort. If you did leave class to go to the bathroom you couldn't go back. Even still there were shootings. No bookbags were allowed so we didn't have take home books unless we were reading one in class like Malcolm X biography or the caged bird.

I also seem to remember teachers giving us notes too.

I really wish more instructors would make their lecture notes available before class. It can save a tremendous amount of overhead to just write annotations and small additions to existing notes. Instead of mindlessly writing there is time to actually think. Some people are weirld cagey about this even though they already have their lecture notes for the semester sitting on their desk.

Isn't there quite a lot of research that shows that what makes note taking during lectures effective for helping you learn the material is the thought required to condense the material down to something you can write down while still keeping up with the lecture?

Elementary Middle, and High School has a way of putting teachers in the role of authoritarian minders, expected to enforce the pettiest standards, that really damages pedagogy. The tools to control your behavior become the tools they use to do their job, and then their job becomes controlling your behavior rather than teaching you. I had similar experiences like this throughout my pre-college education. I think it's a big part of why people get to college and find they actually enjoy school/learning, they may do better in their classes or feel smarter, et cetera. (Of course there are professors who are petty authoritarians as well, but I think the parties are better aligned in general, and you're more empowered to drop classes/choose professors.)

This, like any system, works better for some individuals than others, depending on their learning style. I liked the presentation here, basically “try this, you may find it valuable”. I'm sure that some people found it useless, others very useful. When I was teaching, students would sometimes ask me for permission to record the lectures. I always said yes, because I know that some students learn best aurally, and find note-taking interferes with their learning style.

Teachers (or school systems) that mandate this system, and, even worse, GRADE NOTEBOOKS completely misunderstand the point of it. In K-12, one of the goals is to help students become effective learners, which involves students identifying the tools that help them learn best.

I really like the SUMMARY section, asking the student to synthesize some kind of big picture. I always said that in a 50-minute university class, you can thoroughly explain one sentence and its ramifications. The space given for SUMMARY really asks the student to identify that sentence. And it also gives room for a really good question from a student: “Hey, teach, I can't figure out the summary for that class on recursion, can you help me?”, though, to be fair, no student ever called me “teach”.

    Teachers (or school systems) that mandate this system, and, even worse,
    GRADE NOTEBOOKS completely misunderstand the point of it. In K-12, one of
    the goals is to help students become effective learners, which involves
    students identifying the tools that help them learn best.

A single assignment forcing Cornell Notes (or any other note taking system) might be all right. Something like, "Here's a reading, please submit a summary of it in Cornell Notes format." That gets the kids to interact with the system, and it exposes students to something that they might find useful going forward. To force its use for an entire quarter or semester just sounds like sadism.

Furthermore, from what I can tell, the Cornell system is highly tied to paper (and lined letter/A4 sized paper at that), and is basically useless outside of a school/university context. It doesn't do much to structure your notes. Instead, the class itself is assumed to be providing the structure, and the notes combine with the class structure to provide an outline of your knowledge.

In the "real world", where information is coming at you from a dozen different sources, and it's up to you to provide your own structure, something like Cornell falls down, hard.

> ...identifying the tools that help them learn best.

Ideally, we could present students with a variety of study techniques and let them choose what works best for them. The problem is that most students don't have the judgement or enthusiasm to pursue it on their own, so we have to spend some time forcing it to see what sticks. It's tremendously gratifying to be able to observe a student become a more effective learner, but that happens only with a small minority (leading to dark moments of questioning my value as a teacher).

Another problem is evaluating "what works". In school, outcomes are assumed to be adequately represented by grades. However, different teachers will emphasize and test differently, so specific study methods may not be equally helpful in all situations.

That is all I will ever call teachers nowzers.

I wish this had been taught week 1 of college when I went in the mid 90s. All college's should have a mandatory module on note taking, learning techniques and general planning and productivity.

Sounds like a force multiplier for other courses

I'd also add general theory of education content to that. How do we expect people to learn if they don't understand teaching?

Not so sure about mandatory. A system like this is pretty useless unless you’re motivated to use it. How much benefit would the students taking the module only because it’s required really see?

Most of the colleges I'm familiar with have "college success" courses that purport to teach things like this. I took one. I recall not paying much attention to it because it was in addition to my normal course load.

These study techniques ought to be introduced even earlier like during middle school grades. Time management and information processing are key to a successful educational experience. The fact that this is not generally taught is a major deficiency in most schools.

The main thing I learned watching these videos is that Cornell students—or Americans more generally, perhaps—hold pens in a way that seems unusual to me. For example, with the thumb wrapped round the pen or with it gripped by the tips of all five fingers.

Is that normal in the US? In the UK, I was taught to grip the pen with my thumb and forefinger tips and rest it on my middle finger. Most people I see writing hold the pen that way too.

I'm unsure about these descriptions but in Canada/Qc this is the way I was taught to hold a pencil: https://www.fergusonvalues.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Ha...

Which is the correct way.

I have had terrible handwriting all my life. Could it be because I have been holding it wrong all this time?

I hold by the tip of my index finger, middle finger, and thumb.

Handwriting is holding the pen, posture, technique, and practice. So yes, that's a factor.

That isn't normal, most people hold a pen as you describe.

That's very weird. I'm an American and I hold my pen the way you do, which is the way I was taught. I had never noticed it before but now that I see it, the way the students are holding it in the video is very strange to me.

Edit: apparently I do the "quadrupod" grip, while you do the "tripod" grip. But neither of those is what some of the students in the video were doing.

I am a student here in the US.

I was certainly taught to hold and write with pens/pencils in the way that you describe. That being said, I have noticed that I and many of my peers somehow moved over to holding it with the thumb wrapped around the pen, and the pen held more straight up and down.

I am not quite sure what causes this, but I think that is is related to the way that you must hold many cheap ballpoint pens for them to write consistently. I personally fixed this bad habit when I switched over to fountain pens.

There was a big change over the 1950s in how people held their pens, as we shifted from fountain pens to ballpoints. You can see in pre-1950 movies how people held their pens (and pencils) less vertically.

A fountain pen will encourage you to adopt the old style of grip, with the result of less physical stress on the hand and more legible writing.

Also UK here, I don't remember being taught how to hold a pen. Mine rests on the third knuckle of the ring finger, with the middle fingertip bracing the pen tip and the index fingertip bracing about a third of the way up. Then the upper part of the pen rests in the crook of the thumb and palm. The thumb-tip rests across part of the index finger and middle finger, providing some stability.

The secret is that American school doesn’t really bother itself with that much teaching. Nobody teaches children how to hold pens properly, cursive writing, etc.

Yeah sad but true. I think cursive is still taught for a year or two in elementary school but after that it's not required and most kids just print or develop their own personal blend of printing/cursive handwriting.

I still take notes by hand, on paper, using cursive. I prefer a quality wood pencil and a separate rubber-type eraser for note-taking. For writing text, typing is faster but for note-taking during lectures or presentations I find handwriting more effective, as I can quickly add drawings and arrows and other notation as needed.

I was taught Palmer script in grade school--always one of my worst classes. Basically can't do it any longer.

> I think cursive is still taught for a year or two in elementary school but after that it's not required and most kids just print or develop their own personal blend of printing/cursive handwriting.

This is the natural result of teaching kids unnaturally and gratuitously ornate cursive forms for the sake of it, divorced from the utility that cursive writing is supposed to have. Handwriting forms serve two roles: to be written, and to be read. The point of cursive, outside of the immediate class, is that it optimizes for write time. If you teach people a cursive form that isn't faster to write than bespoke chicken-scratch, well, then it's no surprise they're not going to use it.

My teacher at that age did a spectacular job and was very attentive to my needs. I was ambidextrous and she made me pick a hand. I picked left. I'm left handed to this day.

They don't teach engineering undergrad students how to use sliderules anymore either.[1]

Technology changes. Literally noone other than maybe caligraphers, typeset designers and engravers needs to know how to use cursive writing anymore. It's gone from being essential for everyone to being an extreme niche.

[1] My dad always had a sliderule until I was like 8 or 9 and his sliderule was replaced by an HP RPN calculator. He learned to use it as an undergrad chemical engineer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule

At least in the NYC public schools in the 80's, we were taught to hold a pen/pencil as you describe.

I remember having one friend who held the writing instrument between his index and middle fingers, the thumb at the tip. Really odd in the way he held it, and every teacher we had for 4 years, at the least, tried to correct him.

I tried holding a pen as in the video, and even just miming, it felt really unnatural.

There are many ways to hold pens[0]. The “dynamic tripod” grip is the one they taught in elementary school, but it wasn’t until I bought a Lamy Safari fountain pen a couple years ago that I could hold a pen that way. I use the “lateral tripod” grip, not because I was taught it or even wanted to, but that’s how I naturally pick up a pen to write. It drove my dad nuts and I tried really hard to do it the “right” way, but the instant I stopped thinking about it I’d go back to my way.

It turns out that both of those are considered good grips. The dynamic tripod is preferred, but both are just fine from a physiology, balance, and control point of view.

[0] https://www.ot-mom-learning-activities.com/correct-pencil-gr...

I don't know if there is a technical name for it, but I call the grip you describe as the "fist" grip. I see it used almost exclusively by females and I have speculated that it is motivated by the force required to make legible marks with cheap ballpoint pens. I noted that the boys in those videos were all using the standard "tripod" grip.

I believe note systems are great! The only problem, and I see people talking too little about it, is that you need to create your own, for it to be effective.

It's like trying to use spaced repetition with cards made by someone else, you loose 80% of the benefit.

Creating, perfecting (and using) your own note system is what makes you a learning machine, as it let's you understand how your mind process and learn information. Your system is a reflex of your own mind, and exposes (reasonably) to you how the inner words.

Very hard, thought, as you need a very high level of meta thought. Hence a lot of people see someone's else system and try to use it, benefit poorly from it.

You can and should learn from other's systems, but to perfect what you made yourself.

perhaps even before that, people in general still lack the discipline and practice of note taking

so a gentle reminder to start taking notes!

https://github.com/djcabrera/psmodule-cnotes

^^ Cornell inspired note system via PowerShell function/module.

Thanks to Cornell, the OP, and your reply, I was inspired to do just that. Cheers!

Edit. I am an absolute beginner with PS, so don't expect much from it.

The Cornell Note-Taking System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989063 - Jan 2020 (66 comments)

The Cornell Note-taking System (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21674946 - Dec 2019 (41 comments)

Goodness gracious.

There is an entire generation of school children (at the very least in my locality) who were forced to use an incredibly poor implementation of this method by teachers who barely understood the intent themselves.

On which we were punished for not doing correctly.

The biggest gripe I had about this method was that the lessons in middle school and high school never had enough information density to make this meaningful in any way.

Anyways, I can’t take notes like this anymore. Being punished an entire letter grade for not having enough questions on my notes when I was aceing every single test made me never want to take notes like this ever again.

Edit: I’m sure this system works for some people but it definitely did not click with the way my brain retains information but being forced to try to learn in a manner that my brain did not want to learn has left me with a burning desire to never do it again.

Don’t forget the argument made at the time that this is the way they learn in $OrganizationHeldInHighRegard, so you should do it too!

Were? It still happens. My friend's kids are forced to use such a system now.

Note taking is about the note taker's relationship with the subject so it's idiosyncratic. A potentially useful technique can become a harmful prescription by stupid teachers.

Showing student's lots of techniques and helping them develop there own methods seems more useful.

But it is easier to make a rubric to test stuff like this then help a kid figure out what works.

Thanks for the edit because most students have no clue how to do it at all. Sure, doesn’t work for everyone, but at least a way to do it can be taught. It’s like handwriting. Almost no one reproduces the letters perfectly, we all have our own writing but if we didn’t start with the standard letters we’d have no place to start. I imaging most people on this site did ok in school.

I was this generation, we literally got graded on how well we followed the format of taking notes this way. I hate(d) the system and would only do the bare minimum to get the grade, meanwhile leaving me with notes that were near useless to me because they couldn't just let me take notes outline style like a teacher 2 years prior had taught (and I voluntarily adopted because it happened to work well for me)

On a personal note, I found any form of notetaking is distraction for me to grasping information... I really don't understand how someone could take good note while also listen... I found this only when I starting my PhD. I hope I know this sooner.

Also, notetaking in any designed system is worse than a blank piece of paper for me. Not sure if any one would agree.

> I really don't understand how someone could take good note while also listen...

I type moderately fast, only write when I think "I won't remember this" and review notes as soon as possible to address the pending points. I'm not bottle-necked by this, unless I'm doing a presentation.

that's right there in the article:

> Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop.

IMHO this is an understatement made on purpose to stay as neutral in tone as possible and not offend anyone who disagrees. pen and paper note taking improves retention so much you shouldn't need the notes after you take them (well, unless you're writing down equations or whatever...)

>> Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop.

A 2014 study:

* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976145245...

News article on it:

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-learning-secret...

Resonate with this so hard. At some point I stopped taking notes completely early into my (engineering!) PhD and magically and all of a sudden this dense complex stuff started making sense. Was angry at myself for the difficult time I had during undergrad because of it.

When I absolutely must take careful notes but also listen carefully, I record the presentation and then take the notes from it later. Extra work but very effective. However, I've found that detailed notes are rarely needed. It's enough to note key references and details that seem like they might be hard to look up later.

The rash of "no way" responses makes me wonder: what note taking system(s) have you encountered that actually work for you? (And why, if known.)

From someone who episodically takes notes in haphazard fashion and very rarely looks at them again, and thinks he's probably woefully working harder than he should as a result.

I find for me personally, note taking is a way of forcing me to actively listen. Most of my notes are like yours: haphazard and rarely looked at again.

The two things I do track are specific action items: those get a star in the margin so they can be found quickly and sometimes executives use specific wording they want you to emulate; that gets underlined and then offloaded to a reference document.

I also make sure to be aggressive about giving my notes dates and titles for meetings so I know where/when notes are from.

Though maybe not very useful directly for taking lecture notes, I like the Feynman technique for self driven learning. It's pretty sparse for layout and specific details, but the guiding principles are simple and keep you moving in the right direction: summarize your current understanding of a discrete topic in simple terms, iterate toward further simplicity as you learn more.

______

Step One: Choose the Concept You Want to Understand.

Write it on the top of a sheet of paper.

Step Two: Pretend You Are Teaching the Concept to a Child.

Write an explanation of the concept on the paper as though you were teaching a child.

Step Three: Stuck? Go Back to the Source Material.

Re-read or re-learn the material until you can complete step two.

Step Four: Simplify & Create Analogies.

If your explanation is wordy or confusing, simplify the language. Create an analogy to help understand the concept.

_____

https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/notetaking/feynman

he is on record saying you can't really explain magnetism to a child ;)

https://youtu.be/MO0r930Sn_8

To be frank, this is still self-deception. Your subconscious won't be tricked by this kind of trickery. It's like being both the player and the referee in a game. You still need external feedback to improve yourself.

I type moderately fast (can hit 150 wpm, average 110wpm on typing tests) so one of my favorite methods is transcription. I just verbatim type out what the speaker is saying. I can keep up if I leave out filler words, blow past typos and ignore punctuation.

If I need to recall I just go back and read it again.

Edit: Why not record? Because people get weird about it, I’m not allowed to, or literally illegal. Also, playback at 3x speeds still too slow vs reading. Scanning skipping and repeat also too much friction.

There are some open source projects now using Whisper from OpenAI to transcribe close to realtime, such as Buzz (https://github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz)

The notes are ultimately for the person taking notes. As such, it's a bit aggressive to tell someone they will enjoy your system better than their own. Given that we know that everyone learns differently, it's silly to try to fit everyone in one box. You might as well force everyone to sleep on their stomach.

The ideal note-taking instruction would present each note-taking strategy (Cornell notes, verbatim notes, strict memorization, etc) and then let the student choose for themselves. The way it is now, most students (myself included) won't ever use Cornell notes again out of principle even if we can admit that the system is better than our own.

Even better, apply Auftragstaktik[0] and let the students use whatever they will to complete the task, judge their results afterwards for being able to recall a block of material, and make a competition out of it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

This is what works for me:

- When reading, researching, listening to a lecture/podcast/video/etc, take notes on paper. Don't really worry about the formatting or the organization

- Then, in a separate step, structure and transcribe the notes into org-mode (or OneNote or Roam or Evernote or …)

For me, having that two-pass system really does a lot to improve retention. I can type a lot more quickly than I can write by hand, so the actual time commitment for the transcription step isn't very high. But I've found that forcing myself to go over my notes (at least once) in order to get them into an organized and searchable format does a lot to improve how well I remember what I've taken notes on. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to be as messy and disorganized as I need to be in order to get the information down in the first step, because I know that what I'm writing down isn't the "final version", and I'll be going back over it again to edit.

They forced us to use this in middle and a little bit in high school, never really liked it. The usable space on the page to write details was so low compared to a blank piece of paper, and the summarizing I didn’t think really helped (especially if you needed all the details from the notes like in a history class).

Other people like it though, maybe I was just doing it wrong.

I attended undergrad there 25 years ago. didn't know this system existed!

I thought this thread was going to be about lecture notes that you used to be able to buy in case your own notes suck or you missed a bunch of lectures. Not sure if they still sell them though. (there was a specific name... if anyone here still remembers)

The referenced publication is from 2010. I went there too, more like 35 years ago. Maybe I would have done better if this sort of thing had been available back then.

Note that it's the 10th edition. I'm pretty sure the technique has been around since the 1950s. I certainly remember it from the 90s.

If that's the case it couldn't have been very well publicized, since I graduated from Cornell in 91 and never heard of it.

This lines up with roughly when this system suddenly took stranglehold at my local school district.

Same. I bought the "takenotes" which were pretty good. Also I met my wife after asking to borrow her notes for a class. So I thoroughly approve of the Cornell Not Taking Notes system!

Imo taking notes just takes your attention away from the lecturer and it's best to only write down major details, if anything is written down at all

Also since most lectures have some kind of recorded equivalent now, there is no scarcity with respect to the info the lecturer is communicating. So you can always go back and rewatch. Taking notes just gives you an excuse to not remember what you're hearing

Sounds like flashcards without the spaced repetition. Hardly revolutionary, and I'd bet SR would work better due to the preferential focus on cue-note combos with less retention.

The link isn't working for me.

You know there's this going where people are starting to realize that extensive/fancy note taking is a gigantic waste of time. The only thing it needs to do is to offload cognitive thinking onto something external while you're learning so you can hold ideas. Most learning comes from recalling, not having beautiful notes.

Yes! Something happens when we take notes and that seems to improve learning but recall using flash cards is interestingly much more useful than re-reading the same notes.

Anyone who wants to take a course in meta learning that's grounded in science is recommended to take the practical and free Coursera course Learning How To Learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

I haven't taken notes in months and I haven't seen any degradation to my learning, anedoctally.

You know... the website/videos describe this. They say multiple times there is trade off between transcribing mindlessly vs. focused listening with no notes. The point of the Cornell system is activate thinking of the topic which is why they have a "cue" section for questioning, "summary" section for "what did i learn?". The first step Cornell did forget to mention for some people is to actually attend class before commenting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com