so schools don't typically teach us how to take good notes which is crazy because it's a difficult skill to learn especially if you're taking different subjects like math or science which is very technical versus literature or history which is very text heavy so we've created multiple note-taking tutorials in our ultimate study skills series and this video in particular will cover how to take better notes for any subject these Frameworks come from how to become a straight A student at Cal Newport he was a tough Ivy league student and then he went around interviewing other top
students around the country now he's a professor at Georgetown University so he speaks from multiple perspectives on this note-taking topic so let's Dive Right In in general we have two types of classes first we have the non-technical classes like literature history or poli-sci these classes usually involve long dry reading assignments then we have the technical classes like math science economics these usually involve problem sets calculations code and equations so let's start with the non-technical classes right the three-part framework here is what what Cal Newport calls qec question evidence conclusion so the goal is to make
notes that clearly state qec for every big idea but it's not as easy as it sounds the good news is that a lot of professors will teach information in this framework they'll pose a question and they'll walk through some evidence and they'll reach a conclusion and then they repeat this process over and over for the rest of lecture and the bad news is that they don't tell you which info is the queue or the e or the C right some professors just love to ramble they go off topic and then we're left trying to figure
out what's actually important sometimes the professors won't even State the questions so be sure to put a star to remind yourself to come back and figure it out because it's probably going to be a test question sometimes they'll just hint at a conclusion but they won't write out say it so it's up to us again to figure that out all right so let's do a quick example here because sometimes the conclusions are not exactly straightforward let's say that the professor poses this question who is the greatest basketball player so I'll write that as the question
and then be on the lookout for evidence and conclusion so during like sure the professor might give a simple conclusion like Michael Jordan right and the evidence might be several points highlighting how many championships he played or how he changed the culture of basketball or something but it's not always going to be that simple right because the professor could say that it depends or you might have multiple reading assignments that all look at different Bodies of Evidence and they all arrive at different conclusions so for example the conclusion might depend on which analysts you ask
or it might depend on what stats you're comparing or what about LeBron James Sometimes a question can have complex conclusions or multiple conclusions you have to be able to group together which evidence supports which conclusion so make your qecs as clear as possible another quick tip here is if you're using an app with toggles like notion then one thing you can consider doing is nesting your conclusions and evidence under toggles to making review sessions more efficient so the conclusion isn't obvious then you gotta do whatever it takes to figure it out right ask questions during
class to clarify or ask the professor after class or go to office hours or ask your friends but you want to make sure that you complete as many qecs as possible during or immediately after class when the information is still fresh in your head because when it comes time to review for the exam you want a study guide that's easy to review right you don't want to be spending more time trying to relearn or figure out what you wrote all right let's switch over to the technical classes Cal neoport doesn't explicitly State this framework but
we'll call it the PSA problem steps answer so he states that the key to taking notes in a technical course is to forget the big ideas and record as many sample problems as possible I don't agree with this actually I think that big ideas are very important in technical courses I think that if you can forget about all the numbers at first and just focus on understanding the math in words that will make it much easier to learn so for PSA your professors will most like likely give you the sample problems and answers so be
sure to save them or print them or write them down but that's the easy part the hard part is writing out all the steps on how to solve those problems and annotating those steps so a quick example here I'm writing out the steps that lead to the answer but I'm also annotating those steps right I'm taking notes about what steps are being used when they're being used and why they're being used at that time because I want to understand the math of the science not just in numbers but also in words right so literally writing
out the explanations if I need to or using arrows or Bolding important parts so some professors move really fast and if you don't understand raise your hand and ask questions especially to clarify the annotations if you need to then put a question mark and maybe come back later because recording the steps without the annotations is just useless right we don't want to learn technical courses by rope memorizing the steps we want to understand when to use which steps and apply it to any problem on the exam now most beginner students don't even have a framework
for taking notes so the qec the PSA these are really good places to start however if you're trying to become a top student there are some limitations to these methods in particular they mainly facilitate learning information in isolation yes you might have the qecs for a class but did you take time to synthesize multiple qvcs together and form the big picture yes you have the full PSAs for every sample problem but what if the variables and steps were slightly changed do you understand the reasoning behind the steps enough to nail those curveball questions on the
exam because when we evaluate or synthesize information in this way gives us a deeper understanding and that goes beyond the qec or the PSA method so we do have more advanced note-taking videos like the Mind mapping one for example but I'd recommend that before you go there to check out this video right here because it covers a framework on how to achieve deeper understanding of what you're learning which will ultimately make your notes more concise and more effective for review I'll see you there
