No, I don’t think being assessed relative to subpar students is a benefit. You’d get a better letter grade, sure. But likely a worse education due to “lowering the bar”, which is what you paid for. Educators often can’t grade on absolute scales because the pass/fail ratio of the students factors into their own performance assessment.

There's a lot of comments about how digital devices are viable/helpful for note-taking and just as good as a pen. I think that's missing the crucial point: virtually every device we own today is designed as a distraction machine.

A pen + paper isn't going have any notifications or reminders or updates or emails or texts or ads or alarms or alerts. If there's any device without those that's as reliable and as cheap as a notebook, I've never heard of it.

My issue is that I type faster than I write. I think instead they should push for something like audio/memo recorders.

Supernotes are my preference. They are e-ink, and have an option for a smaller size than remarkables. Constant great software/firmware development, durable, and e-ink. Downside, if you care (I do not) is they're b+w only.

Can side load android apps, they sync fine, work as e-reader, etc. Good stuff.

Remarkables are good I think but they have one foot in the digital artist niche and one in the note niche, whereas a supernote is firmly in the business/meeting/note niche.

I don’t think so . Just anxiety to have it back

Taking a seat in a full class to fuck around on your phone could fit that bill. Someone else might have wanted to be in your seat. In this scenario, your actions in that class could have repercussions beyond just the classroom.

What we did in school and uni never required processing and summarizing anything. Teacher/lecturer would simply dictate and we had to write down anything that what explicitly preceded by "write this down". I'd agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that's totally irrelevant and doesn't have anything to do with writing,

Really? That sounds like way too much hand-holding for a college course. I certainly had times when the teacher told us things that would definitely be on the test, but they didn't do that for anywhere near the majority of the test content, only when rattling off a bunch of trivia and noting which of that was actually necessary to remember (i.e. remember start and end dates of WW2, but not the date of every battle).

Tests should be more about concepts rather than trivia, so "write this down" shouldn't be a very common thing.

I’d agree processing and summarizing helps with learning, but that’s totally irrelevant and doesn’t have anything to do with writing,

But it's not. Studies have shown that handwritten notes improve absorption of material. You can obviously get the same results by improving other study methods (i.e. reviewing and editing digital notes later), but if we're strictly talking about note-taking itself (i.e. if you discard the notes afterward), handwritten notes are superior. So if you're in a situation where you have audio (or better yet, transcribed) lectures, handwritten notes can improve your mastery of the content. You'll get much more value from recording lectures and hand-writing notes during class than typing notes into a computer.

Studying, in its base form, follows these steps:

-take in the information

-record the information

-review the information you've recorded in chunks. Best practice is to review your newly recorded information at the end of the session, and at the start of the next session review old information. If you can review ALL your recorded information on a subject at the start of a new session that's best - at first it's slow but as you review a couple times you're skimming or skipping most of it and only focus on the parts that you have trouble retaining.

With that being said, the ways we prefer to TAKE IN and RECORD information vary between people, but the overall concept does not.

In terms of flash cards, they're great for memorization. That has not changed - it's a base way to record and review information.

A modern version of this applies the base method but digitizes it. Anki is a very good and popular modern flash card app/program

-you can make flash cards with text, but also audio, images, and video

-you can save decks and sync them across all devices and share/upload decks

-it's "smart." If you spend more time struggling to answer a card, or get it wrong, it'll show it to you more frequently. The reverse is true if you get it right every time quickly, you see it much less frequently

-it can nag you to study. You can set it up to notify you every hour, day, whatever and thrust 10-1000 cards in your face, whatever you set it to.

-tons of ways to configure it so it meets your specific needs.

So, that's how things have modernized, for flash cards at least. But plenty of people still buy 3x5 index cards and keep a physical deck if that's what they prefer. Again, the method isn't as important as the process of receive/record/review.

Personally I like to use an e-ink handwriting tablet for in person note taking (all the benefits of paper/handwriting without the fuss of paper, plus lots of other features like cut/paste, linking/bookmarking items, etc) and I prefer typing into a word document when I'm studying from a book. The word document is very clean and I can use structured outlining formatting as well as a quick Ctrl+f to find terms I've written about. But whether it's e-ink tablet or word doc, the base method is the same as when I was younger and it was all paper.

I think phones have their uses but they are awful for note taking. The fastest texter is much slower than writing by hand or typing, and you are so, so much more limited in underlining, highlighting, little symbols, positioning text in weird ways to symbolize things, etc. I don't advocate that people use them unless they're in a bind and have nothing else, but a lot of kids grow up these days and that's their go to method because of familiarity, and we shouldn't encourage that because it's flat worse. However, phones can do great things such as record/transcribe, photos, videos etc - so they're a great addition to the toolbox, but they're not a NOTE TAKING replacement unless they're a stylus/handwriting type, and even those are a poor cousin to a dedicated device for the purpose, but they can be a more affordable/versatile/portable version. My note writer was about $500 and that's a lot of cheese but it was worth every penny to me because of how I use it.

One thing that worked for me was recording the lesson so that I didn't necessarily have to take notes right away and could absorb more information being told to me, have time to think about that information and ask questions in the moment. Then I could go home, re-listen to the lecture, write out some notes, and then fine tune those notes by reading the source material and other learning aids. This worked better for me especially having ADHD than trying to write notes and missing parts of the lecture as a result. Being able to take photos of the board was also useful, especially when diagrams and or visual information was being relayed.

I do think it's important to experiment with what you have available and find strategies that work for you. Not everyone learns the same way.