[bananaflag]

I never got this idea that taking notes distracts you from listening. To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write (especially in math, where I usually rewrote some proofs on the fly so they were less ambiguous and more easy to check for correctness later).

[Jensson]

> To me, it forces you to pay attention so you know how to organize what you write

But that is worse than just listening and doing that in your head, so people who already listens the right way the note taking gets in the way, writing things down is strictly inferior if you know how to listen since it adds an unneeded extra step.

I never wrote things down in lectures and I could ace the math exams without studying more because I listened to the lectures. None of the people who took notes could do that, and neither could I the times I tried to take notes.

[shortrounddev2]

Depends on your note-taking strategy. I would just transcribe what the professor was saying and ended up not paying attention. I turned my brain into a transcription machine and didn't take any time to grok anything I heard, then I had to re-read the textbook later. Nobody ever "taught" me how to study, so I was bad at it. Failed my way through high school and dropped out of college