How to Organise Your Notes in Preparation for any Exam Season
When any exam season approaches, we want to ensure you have the best strategies to review and organize your notes effectively. Whether preparing for finals, working on a thesis, or drafting important essays, having a system that works for your unique learning style is crucial!
At Accepted Society, we believe that genuine academic success comes from understanding your unique learning process rather than conforming to standardized approaches. Just as our community embraces diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, we also recognize that each member has a distinctive learning style.
🤔 This self-awareness is crucial during exam season when leveraging your natural cognitive strengths can make all the difference between struggling and thriving!
Whether you are a community college student still deciding what you hope to study or are a graduate student in the latter stages of your dissertation, there is one universal truth when determining academic success – the way that works best for you, IS the right way.
✍🏻 Journal Prompts: Discover Your Learning Style
Before diving into different organization methods, take 15 minutes to reflect on these questions:
When learning something new, do you prefer:
Seeing diagrams and visual representations?
Listening to explanations or discussing concepts?
Taking detailed written notes?
Physically doing something or creating examples?
After that, think about these:
Think about a concept you learned easily. How was the information presented to you?
When you successfully recall information during exams, what triggers your memory? Is it visual cues, spoken explanations, writing the information previously, or connecting it to a real-world application?
Write down your responses and look for patterns. These insights will help you choose the note organization methods most aligned with your natural learning preferences.
Why Note Organisation Matters
Effective note organisation isn’t just about neatness - it’s about creating a system that helps your brain make connections, retrieve information efficiently, and reduce stress during high-pressure academic periods. Studies show that the process of organising notes can itself be a powerful learning tool, helping to consolidate information in your memory.
Try these out!
The Analog Method - using physical notes, highlighters, images, and symbols to indicate key concepts. You may use a cornel note structure or a diagram which looks a bit more like a drawing.
The Obsidian Method - Obsidian is a great app for making connections between notes and readings. With its intertwined relational tech, this app allows you to not only take notes which connects ideas to its source, but it also offers visual mind maps which are great for those logical thinkers among us.
The Notion Method - Use a database with an intricate tagging system with numerous visual queues, videos and images embedded, etc. to activate your visual approach to note-taking.
The Note Card Method - Who doesn't love a good stack of notecards to organize and sort through your thoughts? Well maybe not everyone but this may be the method for you if you need to think “outside the box”. This is especially helpful for active recall before an exam but can also be used to organize your thoughts in a physical and visual way when sorting out an essay.
There are so many options! If you have recommendations for other methods, be sure to share it with your fellow Scholars on the resources page!
Community Support
Remember that Accepted Society is here to support you! There are Study Sessions running 24/7! If you are struggling with anything, please note that we are here for you! You are not alone on this journey.
Remember: The best organization system is the one that works for YOU. Don’t be afraid to mix and match methods or adapt them to your unique learning style. The goal is to create a system that reduces cognitive lead and makes studying more efficient and effective.