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My main technique from my engineering undergrad days was extremely effective and yet very simple and easy to describe and/or implement. It is: 1. Attend the le
by jrd79 5y ago
My main technique from my engineering undergrad days was extremely effective and yet very simple and easy to describe and/or implement. It is:
1. Attend the lectures and take good notes. Don't write things down that are obvious or that you already know.
2. Before any exam, go back over the dozens of pages of notes and condense them down to 3 or 4 pages, omitting details that will be brought to mind by the things you are writing down.
3. Go back over the 3 to 4 pages, condensing them down to a single page, compactly written.
4. Go back over the single page, condensing it down to a single notecard.
The act of condensing requires you to internalize the knowledge enough to know what you have memorized and what you must still note down. And the act of repeatedly writing down the hard parts commits those to memory too.
By the end, the notecard has a handful of difficult to remember formulas and a bunch of keywords that prompt your memory to recall the salient details. In the US at that time, a single notecard was often allowed during exams, so the final work product was also that card.
(My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.)
- KingFelix 5y agogreat, pretty much used the same technique. I would re-write lecture notes right after class into 3 or 4 pages, helped solidify the material right away.
- rramadass 5y agoExactly Right!.
- Dwelve 5y agoI did the same but in addition I read things out quietly and asked myself questions about what I just wrote down and read. Not simply reciting the core points but trying to understand why they were put in that place, what makes it necessary for them to be that way and how they fit into the broader context. Additionally I'd "circle back" every now and then, i.e. question what happened in the previous page, then in the previous chapter. It got extremely addicting to learn once I got the hang of it. It is remarkable (and quite frankly insane) how much knowledge you can absorb and internalize in a coherent way if you just blast every sense with that input and force your mind to "live and breathe" a certain topic. (I still became an unemployed loser but at least I can learn fast!)
- Cyril_HN 5y agoThis is the same way I studied philosophy and law. That + immersion (go to bonus lectures if interest, join the academic community if you can) is superior.
- eointierney 5y agoThis is very much what I did, but I would add two other things: study above your level, and read the history of the subject. If an undergraduate read graduate level textbooks, especially overviews. This gives one a sense of the context of the subject, an appreciation of "where it's going", a hint of why the subject is still interesting and under active development, and makes the undergraduate material seem almost innocent by comparison. It's much harder, of course, and you'll often find that the entire semester's material is covered in a couple of chapters at the beginning, but the feeling of "how the professionals really talk/think about the subject" is hugely important for getting a feel of the thing. The history of a subject is great for giving the human context, which is hugely useful for grokking how things developed organically, as well as the personalities involved. It can really help remembering stuff. Before going back to college to do Maths and Physics I went out to the local university to get advice as to how to study the subjects. I was told to get Feynman's Lectures ((in)famous) and Boas' Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences (extremely terse but excellent). I did, tried my best, and in retrospect still think they were taking the piss. And yet, when I went back to university a year later, there were so many ideas and intuitions already in place that although the Maths was still computationally difficult the concepts were not as strange as they might have otherwise been. In college itself it was the library that was the real draw, so many amazing texts just there for the reading. To be fair, the professors were wonderfully patient and encouraging. But mainly, just keep at it, hour after hour, without comparing yourself or your efforts to anyone else. It's hard enough without imagining other people looking over your shoulder. I remember a number of young ones who, though brilliant in school, found university just that bit beyond them. Take frequent breaks, even holidays, and remember, above all, that exams are perhaps the worst test of learning we have yet devised apart from all the others.
- foolinaround 5y agothank you for this; the very first time i am hearing this (reading the overviews of high level books), and now it makes sense, but I did not do this as I was studying, nor was I told to, by my profs! Maybe this needs a seperate set of resources to be maintained, say we read a book, it should have resources to suggest higher level texts that would be helpful for this review.
- twelvechairs 5y agoI agree and had a very similar technique. Only change perhaps was all my notes were written as question on the left, answer on the right. Id just run through the page(s) top to bottom with hand over the answer repeatedly. If it was long after a while id just write down a new page omitting the ones i was confident in by that stage. I would say that this is great for school but not a technique that really prepares you for 'life'.
- garbagetime 5y agoThat's less like a technique and more like saying "just learn the material".
- ultramegachurch 5y agoI disagree. I'm intrigued by this technique as it forces you to engage with the material while also prioritizing information, something I've always struggled with. I'm excited to give it a spin.
- rramadass 5y agoYou are being uncharitable here. This is what is meant by "learning to learn" reduced to its essentials.
- rebelos 5y ago> My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming. Then one of the following is true: you have an exceptional memory, have been reviewing the content since then, or are dramatically overestimating your recall. It has little to do with your technique.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 1123581321 5y agoWhat’s your strong comment based on? Rewriting notes is effective because the student can’t proceed without proving understanding by writing new material based on the subject. In the process, the formulas and concepts are repeatedly recalled and tested. Once understood, these concepts provide context for new concepts and information which allows broader and deeper understanding to accumulate. If you are thinking of the Forgetting Curve, keep in mind that years can go by between reviews, and that’s for arbitrary information, not concepts and methods that reinforce other concepts and methods.
- yodsanklai 5y agoMy maths/physics undergrad was mostly spent trying to solve a lot of problems and exercices. I don't think I've had to actively memorize things. I still remember a lot of things. On the other hands, there are subjects that I've been trying to learn just by reading or watching youtube videos and my knowledge stays very superficial.
- akomtu 5y agoThat's how authors of the past compressed and encrypted important knowledge. This is why we've ended up with pearls like "everything is water" and unless you know what "everything" and "water" mean at this level of compression, this is just a funny allegory. Another trick is inventing symbols to compress common concepts, much like the gzip algorithm. Your notes become an Egyptian papyrus to an outsider, but to you they contain all the info without omissions.
- rramadass 5y agoWell said and quite right! Anybody who has studied Indian/Hindu philosophy will be well aware of this problem.
- naveen99 5y agoThis worked for medical school also for me. Except we had a note taking service so I didn’t have to take any notes myself. And I don’t like take notes on notes. So I just highlighted 5-10% of the notes that weren’t obvious the first time around in yellow, then about a page or two I didn’t remember from them in red the second time around. but this technique would not work for 95% of the population.
- technological 5y agoHow do you apply this to something beyond undergrad ? I mean like learning new concepts (like DNSSEC, NAMESPACES)
- rramadass 5y agoNot quite sure about your question but the same techniques apply, there is nothing new (you may find my posts in this thread useful for self-study).
- rramadass 5y agoI strongly disagree with trying to condense to a very compact form. You almost always will lose information and understanding that way. Remember; the devil is always in the details. However engaging in the act of condensing called "Precis Writing" is very vital and a must. Just make sure to do it in conjunction with a Textbook and logically to whatever level feels comfortable to you (a page or two is fine).
- nine_k 5y agoThe point is different. The act of "compression" puts less obvious key points to the paper, allowing you to more easily memorize the more obvious parts. The whole exercise is about committing to your memory more and more of the "easier" stuff, while extracting the few "root" ideas and a few least obvious points / formulas to write down.
- rramadass 5y agoYou have to be careful with this (see also the comment by user "akomtu" in this thread). When you know the subject already and you are just adding more on top, it may be helpful to reduce the new ideas to Keypoints/Keywords and hang the details off of them in memory. But when you are new to the subject you do not as yet know what to omit and what to keep; you are making a judgement call during "condensation" and thus it behooves us to be careful so as to not lose the core ideas which is bound to happen if you try to "compress" too much.
- GuB-42 5y agoInterestingly, that's exactly the process for making cheat sheets. It is well known that some students make these with the intention to cheat at the exam, only to realize that they don't need them.
- witchuer 5y agoThat's interesting, in a similar vein I always thought the measure of intelligence was the ability to compress information. If you cannot summarize, then you do not understand the subject.
- omegalulw 5y agoI would say that 2 is the most important. You have to spend time writing things and 3 and 4 are seem overkill and wasteful - rather just use the time go over 2 again. 1 depends on how diligent your are at attending class and how interesting the class is. I usually tried to find other student(s) who took notes.