Exam Q&A: What’s the best way to make study notes?

Brand Financial Training answer: Most candidates take notes when revising for exams! It’s a great way of keeping engaged as you work your way through long, technical study guides. It provides a means of setting out the technical content in a way that is clear to you and helps you to memorise the material. There are many techniques to ensure you get the most out of you study notes. Here are a few key tips:

Organise your notes

Whether your notes are handwritten or typed, it’s worth taking the time to organise them so you can easily refer back to the material.

Include a contents page for each section/chapter and ensure you regularly update it. You may want to  include key dates and times for revision deadlines to ensure you are keeping on track.

Give each page a header and footer with chapter details. If your notes are all electronic, give your online folders an ordered structure without too many sub-folders. You can, of course, always print and file the paper versions.

For handwritten notes, despite your best tree-saving intentions, you’re likely to build up quite a bit of paper while studying. Storing loose notes in random spots all over the place is not helpful.

If you are using single sheet of paper, ensure you have a ring binder and keep them filed. Some candidates find using small notebooks for each chapter more manageable or a big A4 pad to write everything in one book but ensure that for every chapter you mark off each section with a suitably labelled divider.

Effective Note-taking

Don’t write (or type) too much. Every candidate will do this in their own way, but you should be able to strike a balance and capture the information you need without missing points or gathering unnecessary detail – remember these are just notes!

Prioritise the information you think is more likely to be tested or which you are finding hardest to understand or memorise. Don’t bother writing down information you already know and understand.

Use visual aids This is the approach a number of memory experts advocate. For example, in a formula for each digit you need to remember, associate it with a letter, then associate that letter with a word.

Use highlighters.  These could be colour coded e.g., yellow highlighted sections are parts you struggled with and will definitely need to read over again, pink sections are for formulae that need to be memorised etc.

Write down key points or formulae on flashcards or sticky notes. Post-it notes can be put on fridge door, bedroom mirror, anywhere in fact, where you will see the information every day while you’re doing something else. You may well find that this is a useful way of retaining the information. Equally, you need to condense information into short, salient points to go on a small sticky note, which is a helpful exercise in itself.

You may want to consider using plain paper rather than lined. We know, from decades of research now, that the more visual notes are, the easier you will find it later on to remember them. So, using plain paper will mean you are more likely to draw diagrams, use tables, add symbols etc to make full use of your visual skills.

Training provider study notes

If you don’t want to formulate your own notes there are providers that offer study notes. You could use these as a basis and make your own additional notes on top. They will have the benefit of having a structure in place and be formatted in a way that is easy to refer back to

Whatever you decide and whatever format you use, we definitely recommend taking study notes!