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学习策略 · Study strategy · 5 min

Note-taking systems that survive senior year

Beautiful notes that took two hours to write help less than ugly notes you actually review.

The prettiest notebooks in the class are almost never the top scorers'. This is not because prettiness hurts — it is because the time it takes is time not spent doing problems.

Pick one notebook per subject and one system per subject. Cornell-style works well for humanities (cue column on the left, notes on the right, one-line summary at the bottom). For math and physics, a single wide column with worked solutions is enough.

Never copy from the textbook into your notes. If it is already written down somewhere you own, do not write it again — reference the page number.

Reserve the last five pages of each notebook for your 错题本 entries in that subject. This keeps mistakes close to the material they came from.

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Spaced repetition for English and 文言文 vocabulary
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Building an error notebook (错题本) that actually helps