How do todays uni students take notes in lectures?

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ds is starting uni this year and is starting to think about what he will need. He will be commuting from home (free buses for under 22s in Scotland) and applying for the min maintenance loan to live off, so all that side has pretty much sorted itself as quite straight forward for him.

When lockdown/homeschooling started we bought him an 8GB, 15.6" laptop and an external monitor which should hopefully be ok for at least his first year at uni. We will probably need to buy him Microsoft Office as he is currently using the free download from school. Unless the uni provide this too?

For those who know a student at uni now or very recently, what do todays students use to take notes in lectures and organise notes? Is still mostly pen, paper, lots of folders and type up later/carry it all around with them or do they use tablets and a stylus and keep everything electronically?

He is doing engineering, which I guess would have very different needs from an essay based subject.

Ds is 3rd Yr Eng Lit and he, too, uses notepads and pens. Just much quicker to handwrite, format your thinking and ideas etc and proven to go into your brain better. He takes his laptop to Uni every day, though, in case he wants to study and use the online catalogue, so he's not a total technophobe.

Printing the notes off will cost money I guess. Students only get so much printing allowance a year free of charge.

OP if it's engineering he may need bespoke software which would probably be available from the uni at low / no cost. O365 student was available for download from my uni at no cost however its always lower cost at start of uni terms to buy too. Might be worth upping the 8gb ram to 16gb ram. I'm a mature MA student so still print out things to highlight / make notes on as find it difficult to annotate ones. Younger students doing my course have a mix of laptops / paper notes. Usually coursework and notes are shared digitally especially with the hybrid teaching & learning model.

I'm a lecturer in a STEM subject. My students mostly seem to either print off the slides and annotate, or do the same with a tablet and stylus. A laptop wouldn't be ideal for a lecture as typing mathematical expressions can be very laborious, they need to be able to write either on paper or a screen.

Students used to get discounts on apple products and laptops once they've got their NUS cards - is that still the case? In which case let him figure it out once he's on his course and get a cheaper thing then.

DD uses an iPad and Apple pen. She worked throughout the summer before Uni and paid for it herself.

Mature masters student. I download the slides to my iCloud folder beforehand and write on them on my iPad using a cheap Apple pen knockoff. So do most of my classmates.

[quote YerAWizardHarry]@clary really surprised to hear that! I can type around 85-100 words or so a minute depending on how much thinking I have to do. Not a hope in hell I could write as quickly as I type![/quote]
Wow that is some rapid typing. Shorthand typists when I were a lass were asked to do 50-60wpm.

My shorthand at its peak was 100wpm but I certainly can't type that fast, or even half that fast, and I type all day and have for much of my life. DD would be sooooo much slower than me, never mind you @YerAWizardHarry

@clary I would say I’m definitely on the “fast” side but not unusually so! I’m late 20s and grew up instant messaging which definitely helped

The maths people I know use paper or a tablet with a pen thing, humanities use laptops.

I don’t write notes in face to face lectures because I can’t keep up.

I can type fast but if I type notes I don't think, I just do it in a blur.

Whereas writing notes into the slides means I think more about what to write so I retain it.

I don’t write notes in face to face lectures because I can’t keep up.

When the lecture are recorded, it’s quite normal for students to use those for note taking rather than during the actual lecture. If they attend the actual lecture at all.

Google suggest fast typing would be 60-75 words a minute, and handwriting about 30 words a minute. 75 wpm would be proper touch typing from a professional typist tho, doubt if that applies to many students. I doubt if DD can type at even 40wpm.

Lectures

Sorry @YerAWizardHarry not suggestng that you don't type at 100wpm, just saying that actually is unusually fast.

dd also feels less conspicuous taking notes in her little book, and that is very much her aim, which I do see is sonewhat niche .

Two of my kids used masses of pens, paper and notecards. Maths degrees. You can type mathematical symbols but I think my kids found handwriting easier

Back in my day I used a laptop, iPad's seem more popular now as you can use the pencil for handwritten notes.

They are usually paperless and use electronic equipment, Laptops or iPads.

Depends on the lecture. If I think it's a key lecture I usually write a list of questions that I want to find the answers to. I usually hand write my notes because it helps me think. That's personal preference though and each to their own as long as it helps with understanding.

Thank you for every comment, will keep reading.

Lots for him to think about and good tip about Apple "back to school" discounts if he decides to go down that route or alternatively to perhaps get a laser printer to print out notes.

@mrsmacmc he spoke to a Unibuddy who said they use MATLAB in the first year and an 8GB laptop should be ok for this. He has one already, this one, so hoping it will be ok for first year.

In my experience ..... 35 years in higher education, now retired, most students simply don't take notes. When I first started it used to be a bit depressing....you would mark essays and you could recognise the same phrase in several of them. The lecturer had said something memorable, the students had written it down, and had then regurgitated in the exam.

Thus does show something.....the act of listening and writing really does help you remember things.

In my last job, there were a small group of students who sat and took notes. They were, without fail, the ones who did best in the exam.

Of the rest....about 50% were doing something with laptops / screens which seemed to involve the lecture. The rest were either staring into space or playing with phones. All lecture PowerPoint were on line, so I suppose students just relied on those.

Class sizes have increased over the years and the honest truth is that every course i taught for the last 10 years of my career had a huge tail of students who did abysmally. Poor students used to get through the course by just regurgitating what they'd heard in lectures, but the only reason that they could do this was because the lack of IT meant that they had to concentrate on what the lecturer was saying and take their own notes.

The use of PowerPoint etc means that this p
Option is now gone since poor students now sit in a dream not even listening. Even in a 'prestigious' Russell group university every year group contains a cohort of students whose academic performance is shockingly bad.

My advice....ignore all technology but pen and paper and actively listen / take notes as the lecture progresses. It is hard.....I remember in my undergrad days (mid 70s) that the class would often emit a collective sigh of relief at the end of a lecture.... Attending 4 lectures of different subjects in one afternoon really was hard work.

Approach lectures with that attitude and you'll be in the top third of the class .... guaranteed.

35 years in higher education, now retired, most students simply don't take notes.

I have similar experience. It used to be the case that it was either concentrate properly on what the lecturer was saying or take notes. Now, recorded lectures mean that you can do both. Listen in the lecture and later make notes from the recording.

[quote YerAWizardHarry]@clary really surprised to hear that! I can type around 85-100 words or so a minute depending on how much thinking I have to do. Not a hope in hell I could write as quickly as I type![/quote]
Then you are highly skilled.

An average trained typist can type at 60 - 80 word per minute. 100 words per minute would be considered extraordinary.

My stidents: about half on paper, half on laptops or tablets. (There are also a few who don't take any notes at all and then email the night before the exam to ask what they should study....)

Finishing a masters as a mature student and also use iPad and Apple Pencil. I bought an app called Good Notes and I open and annotate the printouts in it, I barely print anything these days. My university provides office 365 free of charge.