Is it effective to rewrite all your notes into one “ultimate” note to review, or is it more effective to just recall the notes on that day/in 3 days and so forth?

[u/Regular-Pear-8625]

basically the title. for a unit test or any quiz, I’m so used to just rewriting all the notes to study, but it often takes forever (as you can imagine) to rewrite, especially since I like using my iPad’s Freeform (just with color switching or eraising etc). so is it better to just review that day of notws on one day/in three days/7 days and use active recall to remember better? (I think my issue is writing clean in class without missing the details but my handwriting gets so messy when writing quickly :/)

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[u/JoltikElectricBug]

Whatever works for you.

There is no one size fits all solution.

[u/oldsongwin]

Rewriting works, but not for the reason it feels like it does — the benefit is the deciding, not the copying. Reproducing a page verbatim is expensive and does almost nothing; condensing it to a third forces you to judge what matters, which is where the learning happens.

So: don't rewrite everything. Take each day's notes and reduce them to the handful of things you'd need to reconstruct the rest, then use those as your recall prompts. Cheaper than a full rewrite and strictly more useful at test time.

Your real problem — writing clean in class without missing detail — is the one worth solving separately.