<p>1) I would still recommend that you take notes during class. You don’t have to copy down everything that’s on the slides, but you should still be taking notes of additional things that you want to remember (things the professor says, how he explains things, examples they use, etc) when you study. You can copy down the slides into your notes, if you want to, but I wouldn’t. The process of writing things down can help some people remember them, but it doesn’t work for me (though it might for you). If you do do it, I would suggest that you take this time to really think about what your writing. Perhaps, you can put it into your own words, summarize it, reorganize it, etc, so you’re actually studying it, rather than mindlessly copying it down.</p>
<p>If you’re professor posts the slides beforehand, I highly recommend that you print them out so that you can take notes directly onto them. That way all of your notes are on the same place when you go back to study them, and you can be reminded of what happened during lecture.</p>
<p>2) There’s no set amount of time that you should spend studying outside of class. Some classes I never studied outside of class, and some classes I spent nearly all of my free time studying. It just depends on the class, your preparation for it, and how quickly you catch onto it. You should study whatever amount of time you need to to be successful in the class. Those are just estimates that people give, but in my opinion, they mean nothing. Forget about them. School is more goal-based than time-based. If you need to read a chapter or do a problem set or whatever, it doesn’t matter if it takes you longer than 2-3 hours. You have to finish it regardless, so don’t worry too much about keeping track of how many hours you’re putting in.</p>
<p>3) In my experience, when people say they’re “studying,” they generally mean doing anything related to their courses. That could include doing reading, doing problem sets, going over their notes, working on papers, etc (or occasionally, going on facebook :P)</p>
<p>4) This depends on you as well. You SHOULD continually go over the material with time and make sure that you understand and remember everything, so that you don’t cram before the exam. Does that always happen? Not in my experience.</p>
<p>If you pretty much know everything (the class is a review of things you’ve learned before or you just catch on pretty quickly), then you can likely just review the material before the exam. If you’re learning a lot of new material, I would definitely recommend not waiting. I generally always crammed before my exams and it’s not fun. If you have the time, you should spend the time learning all of the material in the weeks leading up to the exam, so you’re not suddenly swamped with material the night before the exam. It’ll sneak up on you, if you let it.</p>
<p>5) It depends on how you learn. Some people are big highlighters, but if you highlight, I recommend no highlighting everything, which is something I’ve seen a lot of people do. The point of highlighting is so that you can go back and quickly get a sense of the main ideas or definitions or things you want to refer back to. If you highlight everything (or long sentences or passages), then you’re highlighting means nothing.</p>
<p>I personally think notes are helpful (if you take good ones) because when you go back to study, you can look at your notes for the chapter, rather than having to comb through the text again. It’s a succinct little summary of the chapter, with notes on all of the important bits. I never liked doing the reading before class, because I always found that the reading had a lot more information than I really needed. By reading the chapter after the class, I could use the lecture to frame my understanding of the reading and to focus my attention to what was important and what I didn’t think was that relevant. But everyone learns differently. Just try out different systems and see how it works for you.</p>