Are these students disadvantaged when they get to university? (1 Viewer)

[StillAlive]

I have a friend who doesn't write his own notes. He reads the textbook, reads other students' notes and takes the good parts from each to form 'his' own notes, then he moves on to past papers. He does extremely well at school. He says that by doing this, he can learn entire topics for subjects in a couple of weeks. He claimed to have finished all of 'Production of Materials' and 'The Acidic Environment' in a month.

Will doing this cause him to struggle when he gets to university and has to write his own notes?

Are there any university students (who are doing well) whose lecture notes are their only notes? What else do they do in their study time then if the majority of their time is not spent writing notes?

 

[Shadowdude]

I have a friend who doesn't write his own notes. He reads the textbook, reads other students' notes and takes the good parts from each to form 'his' own notes, then he moves on to past papers. He does extremely well at school. He says that by doing this, he can learn entire topics for subjects in a couple of weeks. He claimed to have finished all of 'Production of Materials' and 'The Acidic Environment' in a month.

Will doing this cause him to struggle when he gets to university and has to write his own notes?

Are there any university students (who are doing well) whose lecture notes are their only notes? What else do they do in their study time then if the majority of their time is not spent writing notes?

Well, if this person persists - then their notes will just be from the textbook and the lecture notes - which is what the basis of all good notes should be anyway.


And study time should be reading the textbook, doing questions and then writing notes. Writing notes is the last thing you do because you want to apply what you learn first...

 

[isildurrrr1]

i dont take notes and im so high speed low drag i have a distinction avg

 

[StillAlive]

Bump!

 

[enoilgam]

Generally speaking, developing certain skills in High School will help you a great deal with university - people often overlook the value of HS in this respect. Having good study habits and methodologies is probably the main thing - the older you become, the harder it is to grow in this area (mainly because you have to change your habits). It's also extremely helpful to have good writing skills (so many of my classmates had poor writing skills during uni) and the ability to understand what markers want.

I dont mean to sound like a tool, but I went to a uni where a lot of people didnt really try or did poorly in HS and as a result, they entered uni with a poor skill set. Whilst a lot of those guys tried in uni, they really lacked the skills needed to excel because they hadnt developed them in HS (these skills are much harder to develop in uni). The best example of this was when we had presentations. A lot of people put in effort, but you could really see that they didnt know how to target what the markers wanted - so often their work was more "style over substance". That's really a skill you can gain from putting in effort in HS.

Personally, I think you need HS to develop transferable skills - what you learn isnt as important. By extension, uni is also about transferable skills, because that's what employers look for in graduates. They arent really interested in what you have learned, but more or less the skills that you have gained which are needed in the workplace (i.e. time management, team work, the ability absorb knowledge etc).

I know it seems like I am going off on a tangent, but I always hear "Ohh, HS is pointless and doesnt help with uni" and I just think that is largely a fallacy based on superficial observations.

 

[D94]

Time should not be spent writing notes. You aren't applying yourself when you write notes. You will never be asked to simply recount a textbook, and rarely will answers to high mark value questions be simply a stock response that anyone could memorise and regurgitate.

Whilst engineering is different commerce and they are different to medical science, the exams and assessments will require you to do more than give information. It is about using that information and interpreting and applying it to questions which should be designed to test you.

I don't write notes (nor did I in high school) - I just use the lecture notes. But the lecture notes tend to follow a textbook so I utilise that as well. The textbook will have questions, as well as tutorial questions, and those are what time should be used for. There are vast resources such as journals, videos and web applications that can assist in learning. Engineering may be a bit different though - writing notes will not help most students but doing questions will.

 

[anomalousdecay]

Time should not be spent writing notes. You aren't applying yourself when you write notes. You will never be asked to simply recount a textbook, and rarely will answers to high mark value questions be simply a stock response that anyone could memorise and regurgitate.

Whilst engineering is different commerce and they are different to medical science, the exams and assessments will require you to do more than give information. It is about using that information and interpreting and applying it to questions which should be designed to test you.

I don't write notes (nor did I in high school) - I just use the lecture notes. But the lecture notes tend to follow a textbook so I utilise that as well. The textbook will have questions, as well as tutorial questions, and those are what time should be used for. There are vast resources such as journals, videos and web applications that can assist in learning. Engineering may be a bit different though - writing notes will not help most students but doing questions will.

This is very true.

In HS I used to write a lot of notes but that was simply because HSC was a 14 month assessment. Its super hard to remember everything you do in that 14 months without referring to notes.

The note making process is very useful in remembering information (especially when using colour pens, diagrams, etc).

However uni is mainly 15 weeks for examination, then the rest is needed in bits and pieces here and there for other courses later on in your program.

So the best thing for uni is to read over and understand the lecture notes, while annotating and making clear any points that you did not understand when reading them before the lecture (this is where the lecturer is super helpful in clearing up any points you are confused about).

So generally (especially for engineering) as D94 said, reading the textbooks and doing questions from them (if you have time because we have 50 page chapters with 100 questions per chapter lol), as well as doing the tutorial questions (which should be top priority over the textbook questions), will be most helpful in getting the good marks for the 15 weeks of study. In the revision periods, you can just read the lecture notes and refresh your memory. And generally for engineering, the textbooks are useful later on for other courses and help you out heaps for revision (as well as the lecture notes), which allows you to save time and get the best from both parts.

But anyway, writing notes for 2000 pages split up into 3-4 textbooks in 15 weeks is way too hard to do lol.

Reading them would be sufficient because some material is not as important.

 

[brent012]

I was that guy back in High School. I am doing better in university than I did in school, i'm tempted to say my habits haven't changed but i'd be lying - I have slowly started putting a little more effort in since starting uni.

In university there are no "syllabus dot points" that you can write notes too, and not a whole range of resources directly written around the syllabus. Usually there will be lecture notes, and a textbook which those notes may have been based off. You can (and should) find many resources online but you cant blindly learn or even trust everything and have to know what you should be learning.

I'm definitely not saying someone who writes their own notes in the hsc will have it harder in uni, quite the opposite as they have a good work ethic already. The problem is that you can achieve good marks in high school with brute force roting and regurgitation - in my opinion people who employ those methods might have a harder time in uni than someone who takes a pragmatic approach.