How to Study (2023) | Hacker News Reader

How to Study (2023)

cse.buffalo.edu

275 pointsTomte91 comments

> Should you concentrate on taking notes or should you concentrate on understanding what you are learning?

I always always erred on the latter. I was definitely in the minority. It took me ages to work out why nobody else ever asked questions (or challenged errors).

They were just writing stuff down to process later. I have never understood it, it seems so obviously like a wasted opportunity. At that point why go to class at all, you could just get sent notes!

The most effective use of taking notes is to actively engage with the content by figuring out how to organize it and what to include and what to leave out. Even though the author says to just capture everything, if you are doing it by hand, you are making decisions on what to write and what to skip simply because you can't write as fast as someone talks. One of the reasons taking notes on a computer isn't as good for retaining information is because you CAN probably keep up with how fast a professor talks and capture everything--so you don't end up actively thinking about what is being said.

This is a great use in the short-term. In the long term, you also need situations where you will apply directly the contents of your note. You can explain the subject to your friends or co-workers, use it as the basis for research that you are yourself doing, or synthesize what you've written down with knowledge coming from other books. This will keep you coming back to your notes, and you'll feel that your knowledge is increasing and getting sharper each time.

Exactly this. Focusing not just on what you write, but how you find what you wrote is very important.

I started using Org Roam a bit over half a year ago. My policy with deciding what to store in it is: "is there a chance I will want to remember this later?" If yes, I write it down, and link it to something relevant, which allows me to find it later from the backlinks on that relevant note. I thought I had pretty good memory (I still think it isn't bad for a normal human) but I have been surprised fairly often that some tidbit of information that I want is neatly available as an atomic note, and I don't even remember writing it.

Most effective learning experience I ever had was reading the relevant book chapter before class, taking some broad notes to structure my understanding, and then asking questions during class when either the lecture didn’t make sense or we reached a confusion I had from reading.

I only managed one class like that and only near the end of my undergraduate career. Both earlier in ugrad and in grad school I was way too busy barely staying afloat to be so meticulous about my education.

This is the correct way to approach the note-taking vs. paying attention debate. Most of the students (including me in my early undergrad days) come to classes with blank slates. This forces your brain to be in panic mode when encountering new information from the lecturer by either jotting ferociously or not paying attention because, of course, the lecture slides will be posted in Google Drive later, after the lecture is done.

For engineering classes, I would rather invest the entire time in the class to focus, ask questions, and read the content from the textbooks if it's standard stuff covered there. The ideal scenario is doing it before class, but even going through textbooks on the same day and creating notes based on them works fine for me. During my pre-undergrad days while preparing for entrance exams, my teachers would ask everyone to just listen to the whole topic while they used to explain on the whiteboard, and only at the very end, after the board was fully covered, would they give everyone 5–10 minutes to jot down the content in their notebooks. I really think that really balances all the classroom learning, but I have never experienced the same type of teaching philosophy elsewhere since then.

I also think that a particular type of learning style can't work across subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all. You can't study history the same way you do mathematics. Physics is very different from chemistry, and computer science is definitely different. A lot of universities (anything outside the top 10) in my country really got CS education all wrong. I see kids writing code in their notebooks. Mugging up random information. It's really jarring.

Took me a while to understand that taking notes is a waste of time, but in France you are taught to go to class and mindlessly just write down EVERYTHING the professor writes on the board. And the professor will just spend 1-2h just writing with 0 interaction. It’s really sad and it’s surprising that we are good at stuff as a nation.

Btw this is university for you in France. Maybe we are good as a nation because everything before uni is actually good, and people who are good actually don’t go to uni but to grandes ecoles ? (Equivalent of ivy leagues)

I found I never went back to notes. Getting ahead is the best path.

The one thing worth writing down was exam hints.

I opted for understanding as well. And my grades as an undergraduate suffered because of it. Understanding takes concerted effort over time and traditional pedagogy, especially real-time lectures, are poor at conveying understanding.

I wish I had had YouTube back in the day, or at least video recordings of lectures that one could pause and rewind to portions that weren’t understand on the first pass.

Yes, I look at note-taking as a skill that essentially is summarizing what you are listening to, writing down questions, etc. It should be an active process, not a passive one.

But this is a skill that takes time to cultivate. Writing down what you hear and then rewriting your notes later does accomplish the same task, and it gives you more time to do it.

Thats great but not when the lecturer assumes you already took the notes down before going to the lecture and spends less then a minute on each slide filled with forumals

The line I always heard about that was that just by taking notes you'll remember and process more of the content, even if you don't review them later. I think for some content this was true for me, but it definitely wasn't universal.

The author specifically calls out why just being sent notes doesn't help, when some teachers do exactly that.

The advice is to understand, and consider questions while making notes. He has a section on when to ask questions in class.

The very next line after the one you quoted explain why he errs towards the former, but it does not say you should not concentrate, you should not try to understand, and you should not ask questions.

"understand, and consider questions while making notes."

Theres not enough time to do all 3 of those, pick 2

There is absolutely time to do all three. He even suggests ways of making notes in a condensed way. If you're actively listening, thinking about what you're writing, you're dealing with the level of understanding appropriate to have in that moment.

Note-taker here. Actually, I had to really do my best to only focus on writing everything down. When I tried understanding the stuff being taught I got involved in an inner monologue trying to solve my own question and by the time I snap back to reality I missed a chunk of what was being said. Did nobody else have this problem?

I did the same. Always listened ti lectures only (or skipped them) and then took meticulous noyes based on the textbook chalters covered. This usually was essentially rewriting the content of those chapters in my own words in while sentance and never using pronouns or bullet lists (this is important)

I found this to be an ibcredibly effective learning technique

This is a great guide and something I wish I had in my undergrad.

I found that I sort of breezed through elementary and high school because I was smart enough to do well enough without any real studying. When I got to university, I had a pretty rough first year as I discovered quickly that 1) that didn't work anymore, and 2) I didn't actually know how to study. I eventually developed most of what's in this guide, but it would've been great to just have someone tell me this instead.

A lot of what makes college different is most of the professors aren't good teachers aren't aren't all that interested in teaching.

Well, that and the material growing far more complicated and demanding. I always had peers and online access to excellent teachers for any subject, if the professor wasn’t cutting it!

this really depends on where you go to college. I went to a small liberal arts college (not one of the "good" ones), and my profs loved teaching. It was their whole job, they did almost no research (the cs depts research was all "how to teach cs" type research). Seeing how other people experienced undergrad, I couldn't be happier.

This will be fairly unpopular, but we idolize _all_ teachers too much. Wait - Let me qualify that. Teaching, like all professions, has people who are not good at their jobs or just want to coast through. Hell there are doctors who do just that, despite medicine education taking a huge part of their life - but there are less of them for that reason. Teaching doesn't require as significant year sink as medicine tends to.

Not all teachers are good. Some are just atrocious ones with ego, and a lot are there just for the tenure.

Well maybe you shouldn't put too much weight on teachers or lectures in the first place.

Everything that is being taught is quite likely derived entirely from the textbooks in the syllabus. Lectures are also time limited, littered with people of varying experience asking questions during (if at all), while the person at the front of the class draws or recites with varying quality, worsened by accents, lack of coffee, or pure lack of interest, the person in behind the lectern might even die suddenly (in the middle of a sentence even, n=1 myself).

The textbook will probably be far more rigorous than lecture ever was anyway, and you can take whatever speed you want.

That formula worked for me for entirety of undergrad, and it was expected of me during my graduate studies. If I had better control of the internet or material on the internet was as good as they are today, I am certain any other student could do the same.

I agree here too. Grad studies was a new lesson altogether -- not just how to study but how to teach yourself whole topics it would now be assumed you know :)

it sounds like you're saying that grad school trains people to be autodidacts

Just that mine did. I couldn't effectively do new research if I didn't understand the latest research, and there often wasn't someone to teach it. I found my advisor would guide but rarely lecture. This is especially true as my research was cross disciplinary, so I had to know topics that had nothing to do with my own undergrad.

interesting, thanks!

Same. The thing I had to learn very late is that you have to do the homework. Always. That's something I never had to do up until college.

I hit a wall in the same way, but quite a bit earlier, sometime at the latter end of middle school. It was especially clear in semester-long final projects. I could get through things on a day-to-day basis, often by last-minute effort but sustaining progress on something that was so far in the future (initially) tripped me up. I wished my classes in middle/high school had adopted the technique of requiring progress steps throughout the semester.

I need the version of this guide that's written for those of us who never hit that challenge in school, but got absolutely clobbered in real life by the fact that most success depends on incremental effort over time, not immediate or last-second success.

People kept telling me it would happen at the next level of schooling, and I kind of wish it had. At least then I might have learned what to do about it without the risk of "failure means I have to live outside."

Interesting read. I can say that I have been a very successful student (graduated with best GPA in class, did a PhD, now a professor) and I did things very different to what's described here. Goes to show that different people might need very different studying styles.

Calculating hours of study per week beforehand? No way. I studied what was needed. If a semester was easy I studied less, if a semester was hard I studied more. I only counted hours after the fact (sometimes) to track progress. But IMO the variance in course difficulties is so large that if you allocate a constant amount of time to studying, you will fall short sometimes and study too much other times (yes, one can study too much: studying when it's unneeded and you'd rather be reading a novel, doing sports, having a drink, or whatever is wasting time).

Rewriting notes? No way. Notes took in class were the final version (at most, I could add things that I missed, but I never rewrote anything). I do concur with the author in that I did prioritize taking notes over immediate understanding - my notes were quite appreciated by the class because I took down practically everything (using a fountain pen helped!).

Highlighting text, be it with markers, underlining, etc.? Never.

And what I consider to be the key that made my study work (this was mostly a post hoc realization): I used a variant of what the post calls "read-recite-review method" (I didn't know the method formally, this is just what I did spontaneously) but where "recite" wasn't just reciting, but explaining the material to an invisible audience, aloud, while walking around the room, with a quite dramatic tone, gesticulating, and in English (whereas the material was written in Spanish).

When I started to do that I think the main reason was just to avoid boredom (which of course is no small matter when studying), but later I realized that needing to explain the material, and especially translating it to a different language in real time, is a way to force your brain to understand it and not just merely recite in automatic mode.

Not sure if it would work for other people, though... and it does have the drawback that you need to have a room for yourself with some privacy. I hardly ever studied in libraries :)

He suggests you stop studying when you feel you have learned the material - that you are eager to get to the exam to see if your guesses about the content were correct. On easier subjects, that should happen earlier.

He does not advocate highlighting with markers. He has a specific style of highlighting which sounds more like collecting notes (with a bibliography) for research or producing a paper. It feels more task-oriented.

He also mentions read-recite-review in the article.

I think explaining the material to another person is a good idea - even if you don't actually do it, if you can rephrase it as if to another audience, it means you've really understood the material. I think that's part of the reason he suggest re-writing notes after class.

How to study: Start by actually doing it. I see people spend more time on study planning than on actually learning. Others spend hours trying to determine what will or won't be tested rather than just learning the material. See Arnold Rimmer.

It's a really common problem with language learners. They'll spend so much time deciding what is the "right" language, what are the "best" resources, and how to plan out their study to learn as quickly as possible. And they learn so much less than the people who just get started.

There's nothing wrong with a little bit of "learning to learn," but you have to be on guard against using it to do the hard work.

I used to teach a 300-level class that had many ESL students. They asked me how best to learn proper english. I told them to watch BBC comedies. Not antiques roadshow but Blackadder, Blacks Books and The Thick of It. Or anything with Attenborough. Listening to Rowen Atkinson tell a joke would improve their language skills far faster than coming up with mnemonics to better-memorize the Queen's order of adjectives.

It’s funny that I took the parent comment as referring to programming languages, but it totally works for people learning spoken/written languages as well. It really is a universal thing.

i think it only makes sense for referring to programming languages. someone who wants to get a job in the usa, understand their favorite anime, study the buddhist scriptures, or write a new translation of the odyssey isn't going to 'spend so much time deciding what is the "right" language'; the right language is almost uniquely determined by the application area, being respectively english, japanese, pali, and homeric greek in those cases. it's only programming languages where we dither about whether to learn c, scheme, javascript, or rust, because we can do the same things in all of them

Funny enough, I was referring to natural languages. You're right that in some cases it's very clear that you should learn English, Japanese, etc. but for many others they're actually attracted to a few languages. (e.g.,I like both Italian and Spanish, which one to learn first? Should I learn ancient Greek or Biblical Hebrew first? Would learning modern Hebrew first help me with Biblical Hebrew?) They don't realize that whatever they choose is going to be hard, so it's better just to choose one instead of dabbling.

it makes some sense to spend some time investigating the potential benefits of different languages, maybe learning a bit of each, before moving to italy or whatever, but certainly it's true that choosing a language to devote time will produce valuable results, while evaluating different languages will not

with respect to those particular questions:

many more people speak spanish than italian due to colonial-age history, and portuguese is almost a spanish dialect. for us residents with culinary aspirations, it may be worthwhile to know that spanish is required for most us restaurant kitchens. but italian isn't that far from spanish either; learning either spanish or italian will make it much easier to learn the other

ancient greek or biblical hebrew depends on which books you want to read. the torah is in biblical hebrew; platon, the hellenistic scientists, and the new testament are in classical to koine greek. modern hebrew will help you a lot with biblical hebrew, because it sort of skipped 1800 years of the sort of linguistic mutation that transformed classical latin into spanish and italian, and it is of course mandatory for living in israel. it may be helpful for flirting with israeli backpackers too

"College... and the Police Academy movies."

--Cassandra Wong (Tia Carrere), Wayne's World, on how she learned English

This resonates with me. I feel this pretty strongly whenever I see people criticizing Duolingo. I've had so many people tell me it's not the best way to learn a language (and honestly they're right I'm sure) but on the other hand a few years of doing Duolingo for like 5 min a day has given me functional enough spanish to get around mexico on my last trip. I don't really care if it's not the best way because it's something that's easy to get started on and do every day consistently.

I agree with you. I'm now fully fluent in French and applying for French citizenship, and I didn't get there because of Duolingo, but I never would have gotten started without it.

But that is the actual problem. It's like telling people how to lose weight. Eat less. It's true, and it doesn't help.

How do you actually get yourself to do it? What are the blockers, and how does one deal with them?

Not sure if this helps, but I grew up in a bad place and had some unpleasant jobs. For me, the thinking was always straightforward. Studying is free, moves me forward professionally, and can therefore keep me from falling backwards to those times. I have always had horrendous sleep problems so studying is just physically tough. But it beats the shit out of being poor or harassed by idiot bosses.

Retired now, but his has helped me for all 40+ years of my programming & business careers.

Sure - but imagine someone doesn't have your drive or experiences of studying being an opportunity climb upwards. IMO, individuals that are lacking your desire + intentionality would benefit from this.

Well I started out not being motivated to study, and not knowing how. I had to cobble these skills together as an adult.

> but imagine someone doesn't have your drive

Sometimes, the lack of drive is because it's not something you really want to do.

Caveat: while not super common, in my case the "not having the drive despite being x/y/z good traits" just turned out to be undiagnosed ADHD. Dopamine is strongly linked with willingness to do tasks and is affected in ADHD. Of course this isn't the case for everybody, but if you/someone is chronically late/procrastinates, is very unorganized/messy, struggles to finish tasks etc - it's worth googling executive dysfunction at the very least, and then perhaps talking with your doctor.

Good point. And agree that it’s insufficient. We must understand the why behind it and also learn how to create a supportive environment.

For instance, remove all the bad food from sight and replace with good ones. Put on shoes and active wear before even deciding to do some exercise. And many many other tricks..

Like most things, getting the habit is the hard part.

My pet peeve in college was people who "studied" for "12 hours yesterday" but never had more than 12 minutes of continuous focus.

Personally I have the most success with a couple of hours of focus followed by 30-120 minutes of doing anything else (walking, billiards, lunch, netflix, whatever)

This is my study strategy. You need time to digest what you've studied, especially for the topics that are particularly dense or just go over your head easily.

There was a guy in my fraternity who would never do anything fun with the group except on Saturday nights because he would always stay at his dorm and "study." Some of his roommates would come to events and would attest that he was at his dorm before and after they left/arrived back at the dorm, so he wasn't sneaking around having fun. We never did any crazy hazing or many forced events except the week before initiation which was the first week of the following semester, well outside of test time. When he got his grades back, he had C's and below, and failed several classes. Because of this he got his silly nickname: Ferd, because he was a "fake nerd". He missed out on all that fun for nothing.

For all you know he had a hard adjustment to the college workload. Maybe his high school was not serious and nobody really challenged him. You all could have interrogated why he may have struggled and shared your strategies for success, lifting him up rather than beating him down. That would make you true “brothers”.

What a weird “I hate fraternities” response. It’s clear you’d really struggle with a group that holds itself accountable.

ever imagine what will happen if he does not study at all

A lot of this is covered and contributes by Adam Grant's "Hidden Potential"

Learned that different learning styles was bunk (visual vs auditory). Also, experts are the worst teachers, they are far removed from being in your shoes and do not provide the empathy or the correct scaffolding to start newcomers down the path of understanding a topic.

The biggest success for pedagogy impact is study groups, and tutoring while or immediately after learning something (the accountability of needing to teach someone bumps.your motivation to understand the nuances, plus the act of teaching helps you remember)

In my experience those are pretend experts, that are either shy, either also not comfortable with the material.

The one that really understand the material don't hesitate to tell you their real understanding and thoughts pattern even if those are not strictly correct and could never be written down in a publication.

But that's exactly how you catch the deep understanding fast. If the prof. is not giving you that it'll take much more time to get an in depth understanding of the course.

How to Study: A Brief Guide - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16202123 - Jan 2018 (58 comments)

How to Study (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14088786 - April 2017 (71 comments)

Speaking of school and academia, my daughter is taking the SAT test and me and her are both bamboozled by the passages. The texts are very dense and you don't know what detail to take note of of or discard so your short term memory is immediately overloaded with information. Are there any tips on how she can get better at seeing "through" the details so she can get the essence of the text to answer the questions? She is reading literature and reading The guardian, science articles etc. but none seem to help her.

Read the question first, then read the passage

Yep, I got a 2380 on my SATs and the trick was literally to just study for the test (overfit on the style of the test)

Look through the questions and many of them mention specific passages. Mark those sections in the reading first and then read the passage.

Tons of little tricks like that.

To GP, this is the correct strategy.

Further, to improve thinking, she needs to do a post-mortem after every practice session. Go over every question, and irrespective of whether she got it right or wrong, she needs to figure out how she could have thought better and faster.

This works for homework problems in school, too. Look at the problems, then go to the text(s).

Do you have an example on hand? I don’t recall SAT questions being more than a few sentences but it’s been years since I took it and I know at least one major section has changed.

There's a reading comprehension portion where you have short readings (about 4-5 paragraphs in length as I recall, but it's been a long time) and several questions based on the reading. The questions themselves are still short, 1-2 sentences, but the context for answering those questions is not.

The "trick" for me on tests like that was to skim the reading and note key items (dates, names, topic terms) and then review the questions. Most of the time I could answer them directly, but if not I could go back to the reading and find the answer. Having skimmed it, I could jump straight to the relevant sentence(s).

Have you tried studying using the SAT Prep Black Book? It explains really well how to study for the test and why the test is designed the way it is

This is great. A lot of these points were critical things I had to learn the long way in college. Rewriting notes is a huge one for me.

> 3.7. Don't Take Notes on a Computer

The amount of notes I typed up in my personally designed note taking format with custom scripts for compiling them into static sites and PDF documents, all to never look at them again is astounding. The best notes I ever had were the ones I wrote on paper. Just being able to draw picture of what you're learning makes typed notes so much harder.

Especially in computer science, there are so many things I'd want to draw. Drawing a B Tree on paper is so much easier and better than having to do ASCII art on the fly while your professor is going to the next slide.

If there are any students in this thread, please heed some of these points on the linked post. Save yourself a headache.

Taking notes by hand is huge for me, but also branching out.

I have lots of colleagues who obsess over notes, lecture presentations and textbooks. They were always struggling to cram content instead of understanding the subject.

Seeking out further literature and actually researching the subject matter has always helped me tremendously. I don't study for classes, I use classes to study for real world understanding.

Another good resource: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn

Maybe a bit overkill to work through the whole thing, but there is a lot of wisdom in there -- particularly on spaced repetition.

I took this course a few years ago. While I appreciated the theory behind it, they left the implementation up to the listeners and I couldn’t bridge the gap. So it wasn’t very helpful to me.

Edit: by implementation I mean, translating the abstract theory to actual practice. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with what I just learned.

In my uni there is a community project (of which I'm a maintainer right now) to collect tons of learning material. handwritten notes, previous exams, recitations, ...

It's been the most important asset in my journey through undergrad, and I do my best to fill out the missing parts as a grad student as well.

Maintaining this has been a pleasure seeing how it's helping so many other people back

> 3.7. Don't Take Notes on a Computer

I found that being able to type notes saves a lot of time compared to handwriting notes (especially if you can type fast enough). The main cognitive benefit of typing notes (that I have found) is being able to quickly edit and reword what you're writing. It's not practical to erase and re-write a handwritten bullet point during a lecture, but if you're using a word editor, you're able to easily tune the wording of your summary as you gain a better understanding of the topic. Being able to quickly iterate on your notes as you're learning is enough for me to stick to typing my notes.

    For each class, buy a separate notebook from the one you 
    take your notes in. I recommend a "composition" or spiral 
    notebook, not a looseleaf notebook, for your "permanent" 
    (i.e., re-written) notes.

Would somebody please explain to me the difference between these two types of notebooks? I understand that 'spiral notebook' means a notebook whose spline contains a plastic-springlike-thingy, and therefore is able to open flat-180-degrees.

But, whats meant by 'composition notebook'? and 'looseleaf notebook'?

Looseleaf notebooks are ones where the pages can be torn out easily. there is no spine. A legal pad is normally a looseleaf notebook.

A "composition" notebook is bound with a spine (which could be a spiral binding). As an example, moleskine notebooks are like this.

I agree with everything the author said. Also, I would add that if you are taking a course that requires writing, make that writing a daily practice, or at least a few times a week. Make time for it and do it. I used to take courses where the final project was a writing assignment, and I had to change my habits (from reading everyday to suddenly a burst of intense writing) at the last minute to accommodate the task. It's very hard to make this shift. I think a student should try to make their work-day while at university as consistent as possible.

Thoroughly agree with the guide except for the whole section 3 on taking notes. You should have read and taken notes on the material before attending the class, and you should use the class to listen, validate learning, and ask questions, instead of trying to record the whole thing. But yes, do take notes about the things you didn’t see in the textbook, or mentally flag them—and I do agree that you shouldn’t obsess on it being neat.

How to study - in a totally outdated, ineffective and expensive education system? Ok, I just went through the taking notes part. It is necessary only because professors don't give a shit to create notes themselves, write good books or just record their freaking lecture. They are teaching literally the same way as philosophers in ancient Greece, when even paper had not been invented.

I read a book decades ago that had a section on the biological parts of learning how the brain forms memories and skills. Eg what types of food to eat, how and why to take breaks, combination with light exercise, what happens when you sleep. I haven't seen anything like this recently - any suggestions?

You might be interested in Huberman Lab's podcast, he must have some episodes on memory or learning.

This makes some great points, and Martin Lombell has covered something very similar in a rather timeless one hour engaging lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0

Some other diamonds I've uncovered or found while working on learning psychology are:

- that students who organise fun and exercise on their schedule before studying, get better grades than the students who start by deciding when to study;

- that most of us can learn much better with confusing, misconception-revealing content, over simple content - we all assume too much, as Veritasium covered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8&list=PL772556F1E...

- in principle, a desirable difficulty of varied content given in a medium that isn't lazy (read: you need to be able to get feedback, like a quiz, or rewriting, or tutoring) is the key way to establish viable long term learning; several other effects like Spaced Repetition only have benefits if you can stick to your motivation for learning, so you do need to prioritise motivation first. The article mentioned learning styles not being proven; in fact, one can argue the opposite is true; people who learn with mixed, varied content perform the best. But we also like the learning type which is comfortable for us; this boosts motivation. The problem is that studying students across a whole semester and multiple courses rarely happens, and studies focusing on how varying the learning content within a 10 minute window changed how much students learned, does not replicate the value of being familiar with a learning content style, nor the cost that things within it might blur. There are pros and cons to sticking to one style; variation certainly helps in the short term.

- enjoyment(or motivation) matters. Because almost every student reports procrastinating early in the Semester (95% in one study, and I guess the other 5% didn't fill in the form). A real issue with learning research is that it tends to replicate exam period, exam conditions, and not the 60-80% of students lives where many put off studying, gently attend lectures, socialise and work between semester exam seasons. It is in that time that results are predetermined, not in the final weeks. That's what my learning app for students focuses on, and achievable regular cadence of studying in that period; motivating and fun enough to engage before your peers are. It splits content like your lectures up into memorable emoji-represented exercises, and then sends you notifications using the emoji for one exercise each day, to get you to just study a little each day. This has big downstream effects.

- the quality of learning content is as variable as the quality of laptops; some is poor. Key concepts like the "Minimum Information Principle" - that questions based on building definitions, linking concepts and memorizing should have only one short clear answer - are almost necessary if you want to learn a serious amount without forgetting what matters and blurring answers. Long answers, although they seem better because of detail, will drop your grades as you accidentally confuse or forget part of them, as compared to separating them into different or say follow up cards.

How should I study this "How to Study" guide?

I say that jokingly, but John Gall pointed out in Systemanics the absurdity of giving students who struggle to study a class on how to study.

Two words: spaced repetition

spaced repetition

s p a c e d r e p e t i t i o n

s p a c e d repetition repetition

it's better to just learn it the first time and remember it. that way you don't have to repeat. that way you don't have to repeat.

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. You are correct. Learning is made up of two processes: encoding and retrieval. Encoding dominates retrieval in that the better your memory is encoded the shallower your forgetting curve is such that you need less repetitions or possibly none at all.

Combining both: better memory encoding techniques and spaced retrieval is the holy grail. People who employ both feel like superhuman. For example, you can encode knowledge of a book with a mind map following specific principles and then schedule either a spaced cued recall with image occlusion or a spaced free recall or a mixture of cued/free by occluding large portions of the mind map.

In my experience though, I rarely need spaced repetition for knowledge I’ve encoded with a mind map. I have almost perfect recall of the map and an understanding of what it represents many weeks later with no repetition.

Is it the same as some call it Active Recall?

most things you have to rehearse or practice, or you'll forget them. only a few things (foods that make you vomit, for example, or neighborhoods where you get mugged) can be learned from a single exposure with no later mental rehearsal. better encoding helps a lot, but it's not a panacea

> If your grades aren't what you'd like them to be, then you probably need to change how you study!

it's always amusing but faintly horrifying to me to see people in schools speaking as if the purpose of learning is to earn grades, rather than vice versa; most of them are sufficiently educated to know about goodhart's law, but perhaps have not thought to apply it to this question

a useful counterpoint may be pg's https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

> Even though I was a diligent student, almost all the work I did in school was aimed at getting a good grade on something.

> To many people, it would seem strange that the preceding sentence has a "though" in it. Aren't I merely stating a tautology? Isn't that what a diligent student is, a straight-A student? That's how deeply the conflation of learning with grades has infused our culture.

> Is it so bad if learning is conflated with grades? Yes, it is bad. And it wasn't till decades after college, when I was running Y Combinator, that I realized how bad it is.

> I knew of course when I was a student that studying for a test is far from identical with actual learning. At the very least, you don't retain knowledge you cram into your head the night before an exam. But the problem is worse than that. The real problem is that most tests don't come close to measuring what they're supposed to.

...

> Why did founders tie themselves in knots doing the wrong things when the answer was right in front of them? Because that was what they'd been trained to do. Their education had taught them that the way to win was to hack the test. And without even telling them they were being trained to do this. The younger ones, the recent graduates, had never faced a non-artificial test. They thought this was just how the world worked: that the first thing you did, when facing any kind of challenge, was to figure out what the trick was for hacking the test.

i'm not sure all the advice here is even good for hacking the test, though. taking notes in lecture, for example; when i've tried that, i've missed most of what the lecturer was saying because i was distracted by the notes. i figured that the people who were writing instead of asking questions must just be a lot smarter than i was, to be able to understand the lecture even though they were busy writing, until i saw that i got better grades on the tests than they did (a bad measure, but it was their target measure)

if you want to have a complete, undigested copy of the lecture, probably you should film it on your phone instead of playing court reporter. on the other hand, if you are playing court reporter, you should definitely study shorthand first, gregg or pitman rather than speedwriting. on the gripping hand, if you want a complete, undigested explanation of some body of knowledge, you should check out this amazing invention this jeweler guy made out of a wine press, i think his name is gutenbag or something, it can copy down an entire page of lecture notes in a couple of seconds, hundreds of times faster than a scribe

in-person lectures are a precious opportunity to ask an expert in the field questions about things you don't understand; don't waste them on stenographically reproducing a textbook you can just download. the syllabus usually tells you what the lecture was about (and, if not, you can devote two minutes to writing down one line at the end), and if you really internalize the points being made, you won't have any trouble applying them

i'm a huge fan of taking notes; i take about a page of notes per day as part of my own study strategies. i just don't do it during lectures

another difficulty with the strategies outlined here is that they depend on being able to evaluate this boolean

    IF you do not understand it, THEN

but determining whether you understand something is one of the most difficult things about learning! you can't rely on your feelings when you read it; those mostly stem from familiarity. asking 'why?' as suggested is a little better, but it's common for people to accept weak reasons for statements they're already predisposed to believe (for example, because they're familiar). instead, you must try to apply it. one approach is working out possible causes ('why?') and consequences, as well as possible causes and consequences of the negation; but often you can be more focused, because in many cases you are learning a particular thing in order to gain a particular ability. you learn about 'if' statements, for example, in order to be able to write a computer program that uses them (if not to pass a test); so, attempting to write such programs is often better than asking yourself 'why does the if statement in c have parentheses around the condition?', which is not something you can answer—at least, easily, as a novice programmer, or, possibly, at all, given that thompson chose to omit them in golang. (considering that question as you're writing a compiler can illuminate syntax design tradeoffs!)

ideally, you would do this before the lecture, so that when the lecturer is explaining the concepts you were attempting to apply, you know what questions to ask. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39330756 points out that ideally you would read the relevant textbook material before the lecture. while i agree that this ought to be ideal, i'm reluctant to give advice i haven't actually tried myself

adding marginalia, on the other hand, is an excellent idea, just as suggested here, so the advice here isn't all bad

with respect to cramming, a big problem with the schooling system is that it incentivizes cramming on many levels. (just after saying 'don't cram', this text advises you on exactly how to cram.) taking one semester of, for example, greek, involves spending perhaps 50 hours in class and 70 hours studying outside class; if you spend 120 hours studying greek spread over many years, you will have a lifelong working greek vocabulary of thousands of words. by contrast, if you spend 120 hours studying greek crammed into a single semester, then never use it again, you will forget even most of the alphabet within five years. memorably, i had forgotten even 'ουχ', the greek word for 'not'

consequently, almost all the time spent studying in school is wasted, in the sense that it doesn't give the students any new intellectual powers; the temporary gains in capabilities are quickly lost, as the students recede to their previous level, like flowers for algernon. this observation is so commonplace that it fails to provoke the appropriate level of existential horror

if your objective is learning rather than earning grades, advice like 'do not be tempted, by any free time that you have during exam week, to do anything other than studying' is highly counterproductive. to the extent that you study at all during exam week, your exam grades will be unrealistically inflated and will overstate your real level of knowledge, destroying the utility of the exam as an assessment of your lasting understanding. failing some exams will enable you to repeat the classes again next semester so you can study the material you didn't understand in more depth

obviously this is terrible advice if you want to graduate, or even stay in grad school, but just as obviously, it's what you'd do if you were using the exams for learning rather than to obtain credentials to flourish in front of the ignorant

a piece of advice that really ought to be in here, but isn't, is to teach the material you've learned to someone else. another very useful strategy is to get someone else to teach it to you in a one-on-one tutoring session, which will increase your performance by about two standard deviations (the well-known 'bloom's 2-sigma problem'). wealthy and powerful people can get experts to tutor them thus, and have been doing so for millennia. large parts of grad school also usually consist of teaching material you supposedly already know and one-on-one apprenticeship. the rest of us have to make do with asking questions in open lecture, meeting with other students to do exercises together, going to the kinds of parties where people talk about the stuff they studied last semester, and maybe help from family members who already know it. if you have those opportunities, don't waste them

Here are some study tips I did that helped me study on my own time and pass all 4 sections of the CPA exam on my first attempt, self-teach computer science, and self-teach Greek.

- Regular practice. Every single weekday. No excuses.

- Use Anki flash cards for things you have to memorize.

- Use hands on experience to solidify concepts. E.g. speaking for a language learner and writing programs using the learned concepts for a software engineer.

- If you have class, read the material beforehand so you can fully listen in class and ask insightful questions. I often ask questions and the teacher responds with, “it’s like you know where I’m going with the material because that’s what we’re going to talk about next.” Preparation makes class time so much more valuable. My most rewarding classes are often the ones where I jot down fewer than 10 words in my notebook because I’m so engaged in dialogue.

- Teach others. If you are enrolled in class, teach your fellow students a concept you have to learn. If you’re not enrolled in a class, teach a significant other, a family member, a friend, or write a blog post. Learning how to teach makes you understand the concept much better. Particularly if the person you are teaching starts asking questions and forces you to clarify.

- When taking a test with a passage before the question (common on the CPA exam & reading comprehension tests), read the question first. Deduce what type of question it is. Now read the passage knowing how to tackle the question.

- To further that point, take practice exams/quizzes if you can. When I was self-learning compsci, I was really grateful that textbooks had questions at the end of chapters. I used to hate those in high school, but they’re extraordinarily valuable.

Of all of these, I think making a routine to consistently study is the most valuable. It makes the task of studying less daunting and allows you to be more efficient with your time since you can spend times learning concepts at a deeper level. Next would be teaching the concept to others. It forces you to confront whether or not you actually understand the material. Often times you don’t know it as well as you thought you did.

I was a terrible student in high school. I went to a very competitive school and let the workload encumber me and was daunted by the talent around me. I discovered and applied most these concepts in university. It made undergraduate a breeze and my masters degree and self-teaching after university significantly easier. Thought I would share because a lot of these concepts go against how I was taught to learn and what my peers were employing for their learning. It might not work for everyone, but I know it worked for me.

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