[jerf]

In grad school for computer science, after some struggle, I eventually found that the best thing for me was just to not to take notes at all. Just engage with the class maximally, and make sure to do the homework relatively soon after that (maximizing the time between when you cover something in class and practice it with homework, aka, "waiting until the last minute", is a bad idea for all sorts of reasons).

Obviously, my plan doesn't work for everyone, or every class (this is a bad idea for fact-dump classes for me). But certainly after this I tended to look at everyone's list of "things you have to do to succeed in class" more as a menu than a proscription. Still do look at a lot of things that way; you can see it in our industry too, where you can find people telling you just have to use this type of type system or that type of database... yes, thank you for adding to my menu, but I'll examine that for myself, thanks.