Interesting read. I can say that I have been a very successful student (graduated with best GPA in class, did a PhD, now a professor) and I did things very different to what's described here. Goes to show that different people might need very different studying styles.
Calculating hours of study per week beforehand? No way. I studied what was needed. If a semester was easy I studied less, if a semester was hard I studied more. I only counted hours after the fact (sometimes) to track progress. But IMO the variance in course difficulties is so large that if you allocate a constant amount of time to studying, you will fall short sometimes and study too much other times (yes, one can study too much: studying when it's unneeded and you'd rather be reading a novel, doing sports, having a drink, or whatever is wasting time).
Rewriting notes? No way. Notes took in class were the final version (at most, I could add things that I missed, but I never rewrote anything). I do concur with the author in that I did prioritize taking notes over immediate understanding - my notes were quite appreciated by the class because I took down practically everything (using a fountain pen helped!).
Highlighting text, be it with markers, underlining, etc.? Never.
And what I consider to be the key that made my study work (this was mostly a post hoc realization): I used a variant of what the post calls "read-recite-review method" (I didn't know the method formally, this is just what I did spontaneously) but where "recite" wasn't just reciting, but explaining the material to an invisible audience, aloud, while walking around the room, with a quite dramatic tone, gesticulating, and in English (whereas the material was written in Spanish).
When I started to do that I think the main reason was just to avoid boredom (which of course is no small matter when studying), but later I realized that needing to explain the material, and especially translating it to a different language in real time, is a way to force your brain to understand it and not just merely recite in automatic mode.
Not sure if it would work for other people, though... and it does have the drawback that you need to have a room for yourself with some privacy. I hardly ever studied in libraries :)
He suggests you stop studying when you feel you have learned the material - that you are eager to get to the exam to see if your guesses about the content were correct. On easier subjects, that should happen earlier.
He does not advocate highlighting with markers. He has a specific style of highlighting which sounds more like collecting notes (with a bibliography) for research or producing a paper. It feels more task-oriented.
He also mentions read-recite-review in the article.
I think explaining the material to another person is a good idea - even if you don't actually do it, if you can rephrase it as if to another audience, it means you've really understood the material. I think that's part of the reason he suggest re-writing notes after class.
Calculating hours of study per week beforehand? No way. I studied what was needed. If a semester was easy I studied less, if a semester was hard I studied more. I only counted hours after the fact (sometimes) to track progress. But IMO the variance in course difficulties is so large that if you allocate a constant amount of time to studying, you will fall short sometimes and study too much other times (yes, one can study too much: studying when it's unneeded and you'd rather be reading a novel, doing sports, having a drink, or whatever is wasting time).
Rewriting notes? No way. Notes took in class were the final version (at most, I could add things that I missed, but I never rewrote anything). I do concur with the author in that I did prioritize taking notes over immediate understanding - my notes were quite appreciated by the class because I took down practically everything (using a fountain pen helped!).
Highlighting text, be it with markers, underlining, etc.? Never.
And what I consider to be the key that made my study work (this was mostly a post hoc realization): I used a variant of what the post calls "read-recite-review method" (I didn't know the method formally, this is just what I did spontaneously) but where "recite" wasn't just reciting, but explaining the material to an invisible audience, aloud, while walking around the room, with a quite dramatic tone, gesticulating, and in English (whereas the material was written in Spanish).
When I started to do that I think the main reason was just to avoid boredom (which of course is no small matter when studying), but later I realized that needing to explain the material, and especially translating it to a different language in real time, is a way to force your brain to understand it and not just merely recite in automatic mode.
Not sure if it would work for other people, though... and it does have the drawback that you need to have a room for yourself with some privacy. I hardly ever studied in libraries :)