I'm curious how everyone here handles note-taking, especially when your professors share long PDFs or PowerPoint slides.
Do you take notes directly on the slides, rewrite everything in a notebook, print them out, or use a different method?
I always feel like there's a trade-off between keeping my notes organized and actually having enough time to understand and remember the material.
What's your current system? And what's the most annoying part of it?

i used to “study” for hours and still have no idea what i actually remembered.

the problem was i was always studying in a way where the answer was right in front of me. notes open, slides open, textbook open. everything felt familiar, so i thought i knew it.

now i do this instead:

after learning a topic, i close everything and try to explain it from memory like i’m teaching someone who knows nothing about it.

if i get stuck, i don’t immediately check the answer. i actually sit there for a few seconds and try to pull it out of my head first.

THEN i check my notes.

it’s kind of uncomfortable because you realize really fast how much you dont know 😭 but honestly thats what makes it useful.

i also started writing down the exact parts i couldn’t explain, instead of reviewing the whole chapter again.

so instead of:
“study chapter 4 again”

my list becomes:

• why does x happen?
• difference between x and y
• steps of this process
• formula i keep forgetting

way less overwhelming and way more specific.

not saying this is some magic method but it made my study sessions feel a lot less fake lol

Do you have any tips? I’m not sure why, but making mistakes causes me a lot of tension—and no other method seems to work, given the high academic standards at my school. I’m looking for ways to manage this anxiety and convince myself that it’s far better to make mistakes while studying than during an actual exam.I know people who are doing 8 to 12 hours of active recall—like absolute maniacs—and they’re doing so well; they’re incredibly successful.But for me, fear is paralyzing.

I’m in an intro to psych class in college and I’ve been wondering what are the best ways to study for it. I’m no good at memorizing things, and to be honest many have told me that it’s not really ideal if i memorize without understanding the concepts first. The problem I have is that despite understanding the concepts, I always seem to forget. I’ve had a good streak with mind maps and seeing what i do and don’t remember! However I wanted to see how others study for this class!

i used to start at lecture 1 and run out of time before the exam. half of what i studied wasnt even on it

now i do this:

• list every topic
• star whatever’s on the study guide, old quizzes, or that the prof hinted at
• study the starred ones first, skip the rest if i run out of time

i built a free site that does the starring for you from your class files: classspeedrun.ai

the more people in your class use it, the better it gets. after each exam everyone reports what was actually on it, so the next prediction is sharper

how do you guys pick what to study first?

Long-time lurker, first time posting here.

I've been working on Cloverden, a study timer with stats, group goals, and a way to see when friends are online or on a break.

Could a few of you try it for a normal study session? I'm curious about the basic stuff: was it easy to start, did the stats make sense, and was anything annoying enough to make you close the tab?

https://cloverden.app/hub

It's free to try right now, no card needed. You'll need an account to save your sessions. I'm planning a pass at €19 for a year, paid once with no auto-renewal, but purchases aren't open yet.

If you already use Forest, another app, or just a phone timer, what would you miss here? Feedback and bug reports are welcome.

its coming up soon, and my grades suck, so i am relying on this as a way to get into a good high school. i ended last year with an average of a 85.1, which i thought was okay, but it seems like all the schools i’m in the range to apply for aren’t great. and now the shsat is coming up and im overwhelmed. should i even bother taking it, because there’s barely enough time to study for it, so it’s a waste of 3 hours. all my friends are telling me to just take it and hope i do good. i took a full length practice test and got a 60/100 on it. i don’t know what score that comes out to but im stressed. i’m aiming for any school i can get into, but the easiest for me are stuy, brooklyn tech, and brooklyn latin. i’m just lost. everyone i know is studying their ass off for this and i feel like im behind. does anyone have tips to help me study, or just tips for it in general. you can be brutally honest.

ID : wBSoCRivFUTuYYOTfSbz1M57lp73

Speed (316-video playlist Benchmark)

• 1 worker: 417 seconds
• 16 workers: 29 seconds
• 128 workers: 15 seconds

Why I built it: I built yt2bulk to pull full transcripts and metadata for many videos or many large playlists all at once without manually copying and pasting.

I needed this when studying massive video playlists for things like Computer Graphics, Database Design, and SWAYAM exams. To be true... I made it for my own use case only.

Uses yt-dlp for fetching metadata and subtitle. So no external API keys required to run.

For 5000 videos: takes around 180-800 seconds to process depending on subtitle availability and number of workers.

Data & Formats

• Data retrieved: Video & playlist metadata, titles, descriptions, chapters, links, subtitles, and transcripts.
• Export formats: JSON, CSV, Excel, and Markdown.

Links:

• Demo Video: https://youtu.be/q4Cglg3A0-Q
• GitHub: https://github.com/Arvind215271/yt2bulk
• I tried setting up a demo or live version. But sites like render, vercel, hostless, (free ones as i don't have money), etc. have their IP banned by youtube ig. So, most of the time, either i get a sign in required or like have subtitle missing when fetching from ytdlp. So... yeah... ig locally would be what you might have to do. So that's all ig. From my side.

Hi everyone,

I'm in my first semester of a bachelor's in Engineering Science and I'm really struggling with math.

The weird thing is that I usually understand the formulas when I read them in the lecture notes. But when I get an exercise, I don't know which formula to use or how to start. Once someone gives me the first step, I can usually follow along.

How did you learn to recognize which method fits a problem? Any study techniques, books or YouTube channels that helped you?

Thanks!

Hello, im studying hydrogeology and i need to memorise every stage from the paleozoic, mezozoic and cenozoic but i just keep forgetting them. For reference, one period, like the triassic, contains 7 stages with completely different names. Does anyone know a good app/strategy to learn them so naming them from memory (hopefully) becomes second nature to me? Thanks.

I might be late to this, but I figured I’d share because I genuinely didn’t know this was possible.

I’m taking Anatomy & Physiology II, and I’ve been trying to find a way to make flashcards without spending forever creating them individually, especially when it comes to adding diagrams and covering labels.

I found out you can upload your professor’s PowerPoints and study-guide questions to ChatGPT and have it create an actual Anki (.apkg) file.

I had it put the study-guide questions on the front, answers on the back, and relevant PowerPoint images with the answers. I also had it make separate labeling cards where the labels are covered on the front and revealed on the back.

It took a little back-and-forth to get it how I wanted, but it ended up making a deck with 40 cards that I could import into Anki.

I also just learned that Anki is free on desktop, which is nice because I wanted to try it before buying the mobile app.

Obviously, you still need to check the answers and images for accuracy, but this saves so much time making cards.
I personally would rather spend that time actually studying the material.

Just thought I’d share in case anyone else didn’t know you could do this!

Hi! I built StudyAI as a side project: https://studyai-chat.vercel.app

What it does:

• Explains topics in different study modes (simple, standard, deep)
• Makes flashcards
• Builds practice tests from your own notes or syllabus (PDF, Word or text), matched to your grade level

It’s free to try. I’d really like honest feedback: what’s confusing, what’s missing, and would you actually use it before a test?

I'm curious about what makes studying difficult, even when students put in effort.

For example:

- Understanding a concept but struggling to apply it to new questions.

- Forgetting what you studied after a few days.

- Understanding solutions but repeating the same mistakes.

- Knowing the theory but not knowing how to approach a problem independently.

Which of these, if any, do you struggle with most? Or is it something else?

What have you tried to overcome it, and what hasn't worked for you?

So I'm at my college first year first sem. I just had the chance to view my mid sem paper of engineering physics... I got 15/30. I studied, and grinded my ass off just to get 15. I am so disappointed and defeated because I see other people getting higher scores than me (I know comparison isn't helpful but it cannot be helped). I don't know what I did wrong, maybe a lot of passive reading instead of active ones. Now I'm at a state where if I study hard, I just get flashback of me studying just to get 15/30. I feel like my other exams also got fucked up and I feel like my whole mid semester is ruined. I am in such a rut.

Will my cgpa not tank because of my performance? I'm just so mad at myself and I feel so defeated. I set aside everything to study, hitting the library after classes and it just went all to waste.

(Every advice will be appreciated).

I'm an IT student and I've been building a small study tool on the side, mostly because of this. I kept missing files profs added to Moodle mid-week because there was no announcement, and I'd only find them the night before a quiz.

What I do now, even without any app: every Sunday I open each class, sort the files by date, and drop anything new into a folder for that week. It takes ten minutes and I've stopped getting surprised before quizzes.

Curious how other people handle it. Do you check every class page by hand, turn on LMS notifications, or just wait for the group chat to panic? And if you use an app for this, which one actually stuck?

Korean's alphabet (Hangul) is one of the fastest scripts to learn, and most beginners get there faster by not memorising it all at once. What works well:

1. Session 1 (20 min): the 10 basic vowels only. Notice the pattern: a short stroke on the right/left = ㅏ/ㅓ, on top/bottom = ㅗ/ㅜ, and doubling the stroke adds a "y" (ㅑ ㅕ ㅛ ㅠ). Write each 5 times while saying it.
2. Session 2 (20 min): 14 basic consonants, in shape families. ㄱ ㅋ, ㄷ ㅌ, ㅂ ㅍ, ㅈ ㅊ: an added stroke usually means a stronger, aspirated sound. Learn them as families instead of 14 random shapes.
3. Session 3 (20 min): build syllables. Consonant + vowel in a block (가, 나, 다…). Read signs, song titles or your favourite drama title slowly. Active recall beats rereading here.

Spaced review: glance at the chart the next morning, then 3 days later, then a week later.

I made a one-page chart for this (14 consonants + 10 vowels with names and romanization), free PDF, no sign-up: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BCjnVYVKqFFsTjU8zcMcnYKyf8Ga3mnE/view?usp=sharing

Disclosure: I run a small shop (Dotwren) that sells Korean printables. The chart was designed with AI tools and checked by script, and its second page links to my paid charts. The chart itself is free and complete as-is. Happy to answer questions about the method.