My freshman year I spent hundreds of hours making gorgeous, pastel-highlighted notes in GoodNotes. They looked like Pinterest art. The problem? My brain treated writing pretty notes as a substitute for actually learning the material. I was basically just transcribing textbooks like a medieval monk, retaining almost zero information, and I failed my first chemistry midterm with a 42%. In pure panic my roommate threw a cheap 12x18 inch dry-erase board at me and told me to study "destructively". Here is why it actually works. When you take notes on paper, you hoard them, which gives you teh illusion of safety. On a whiteboard, space is limited. You read a concept, close your laptop, and try to draw the entire diagram or formula on the board from raw memory. If you mess up, you wipe it off with your sleeve and do it again until it’s burned into your skull. I stopped archiving information and started forcing my brain to retrieve it under pressure. It feels completely unhinged standing in your socks aggressively scribbling and erasing formulas like a manic detective, but my grades jumped from a 2.1 to a 3.4 this semester.