[scarejunba]

Same here. I wonder if it's the courses we took. I did Mathematics and Computer Science. The only time I took notes it was a disaster. My notes were perfect, my recollection awful. I had to reread them to get any value.

The rest of the time I just sat in class and paid close attention, rarely noting down to look up some lemma or the other. Way better results. Instant recollection. I can still remember the Nullstellensatz vaguely and the room in which I first encountered it and where I was in it and that's almost a decade ago.

[Izkata]

I actually fall into a third bucket, at least when it came to math courses: I'd attempt to work ahead of the instructor during the lecture, instead of just writing notes or just listening.

Because of the way well-done math courses are structured, with topics building on each other, I was able to do this about half the time. Most importantly, any mistakes I made would be almost immediately corrected, so I never learned the material wrong, like if I'd waited until the homework.

[scarejunba]

Right. That’s Mathematics/CS in general, right? The lecture is usually driven by the students progressing the proof. That’s bucket one, I think. I know most of us used scratch work but it wasn’t notes. It’s more like swap space than general disk. I rarely looked at scratch space again, though I preemptively held all those books with me.

[bayesian_horse]

It's easy to copy formulas from a blackboard without mentally processing them.