Struggling your way through JEE or NEET is a long and tedious battle. With endless questions and concepts headed your way, all one can do is hold one’s battle station manning his arsenal of weapons - his books. In this battle against time and extensive syllabus, it’s easy to lose one’s calm and find himself turning through the pages of his vast collection of books only to lose out on time. Just like there’s a hack to all the battle games (looking at you PUBG stream snipers), there are hacks to winning the battle of JEE/NEET as well.
The first and also, most important, is organized note-taking. We probably cannot emphasize enough on the importance of quality notes and how indispensable they are, for cracking competitive exams like JEE and NEET. No matter how much you try to remember those theorems, formulas, or techniques, you tend to forget all the complicated bits when the time comes. That’s why note-taking is very critical.
In the numerous “give me some tips to crack JEE” conversations with cousins, friends of cousins, cousins of friends of cousins, and friends of cousins of friends of cousins, one question manages to find it's way in almost every conversation - “How to make notes? Are my notes fine? Can I have a look at your notes?”. Upon confirmation from our friends over at AIIMS regarding the coming-up of this question in their conversations, we felt that there should be a dedicated guide towards note-making for JEE and NEET.
We probably cannot emphasize enough on the importance of quality notes and how indispensable they are, for cracking JEE and NEET.
Now we are no expert note-takers, but our notes did help us get into IIT Delhi and after examining the notes of our colleagues at IITD as well as friends at AIIMS, we found some patterns in almost all of the notes. Now, it was a mini “Eureka” moment, we would admit that. And we felt that this ground-breaking, earth-shattering, making-you-get-on-the-table-to-dance-only-to-fall-down-and-break-your-nose discovery should be brought out for reference for all the JEE and NEET aspirants. So, hold onto your knickers for this deep dive into the tips for “How to make notes for JEE/NEET?”
In this article, we will mention some of the popular techniques used by IITians and people who cracked NEET so that you too can get the most out of your notes. Let’s begin.
Don’t ever use a single notebook for all your subjects
While we acknowledge most of you are using a different notebook for a different subject, some of you might be taking notes on a single thick notebook. Don’t ever pay heed to such silly thoughts. You might think that taking notes on a single notebook is better because then you don’t have to worry about carrying three notebooks or leaving behind one of them at home. But you have to understand that making a single notebook leads to unorganized notes. And unorganized notes are as good as no notes at all because, when the time comes, it will be hard for you to find what you are looking for. Going a step further, try to use sticky page markers to mark the beginning of every chapter in the notebook to help you during your revision time.
Improve your memory with different colored pens, but….
Don’t take our word for it, but even the psychology journals have numerous research papers that have proven that using colored pens produces a higher level of attention and increase memory performance. And in fact, our chemistry notes are a testament to that. Especially for Chemistry and Biology, colored pens can be truly indispensable and a huge help for quick revisions. When it comes to memorizing exceptions for Chemistry, the colored pens add to the visual memory and hence increase the retention.
But this doesn’t mean that you go around playing Pablo Picasso in all your notes. While colored pens can aid memory retention, they can also slow you down. Hell, they can even distract you from truly grasping the concepts and make you lag behind in class. Especially in the cases of Mathematics or Physics, a simple highlighting, making a box around, or writing the important concept or formula in UPPERCASE should be fine.
Use your own language
No, this doesn’t mean that you have to invent a whole set of alphabets for yourself (only Shakespeare is allowed to doth yond). It means using abbreviations and shortcuts that you can understand easily. It also means not taking care of handwriting as long as it’s legible to you. Using a bit of “Hinglish” is more than encouraged as it can save time and is easy to remember. Also, try to use flow charts and diagrams instead of plain words to again strengthen the concept in your brain by visual memory as well as to save time.
Use every inch of the notebook wisely
Every ruled page in a notebook is divided into different sections and you can definitely take benefit of this. For example, you can write the value of different constants used on the header of the same page. This way when you will turn the pages later, you can easily glance over the constant’s values and feed it to your memory one more time.
You can come up with similar hacks for the footer, left column and right column. Maybe abbreviations in the footer. We highly recommend you test this on your own and adjust according to your needs.
Make a quick revision notepad
Okay, so you have followed all the thumb rules given here and made yourself the awesome notes that will benefit you in your whole preparation. But are you really going to study those notes one or two days before the actual attempt? We highly doubt it. Apart from writing notes regularly in the class, we recommend you maintain a small notepad (or a thin booklet) to write down the theorems or formulas that you always forget. And when we say a thin booklet, we really mean it because then only you can revise it a day before the exam. To make such a compact notepad, you have to be very conservative about which formula/value you want to enter in it; otherwise, it will just become your regular notebook which will not be ideal for revision.
Writing down trick solutions can help
Very often, you will come across nasty trick questions (in Physics or Mathematics) with solutions you didn’t expect at all. And just as you appreciated the beauty of this solution, you can always expect to forget it as well. It can prove helpful to jot them down in a small box alongside your regular theory notes so that when you revise your concepts, you also revisit the trick. Of course, just knowing the trick isn’t enough and has to be supplemented with practicing a large number of questions, but these small revisits will help nonetheless.
Now, there can never be an exhaustive list of note-making to-do’s but here we have tried our best to point out the things that worked for us and several other successful IIT and AIIMS students. Note-making is a highly personalized activity and there is no one technique that suits all but these tips might be a good starting point for you if you feel that your notes aren’t working for you. So go ahead and give them a try. We hope that they will help you.
If you feel that we missed out on some aspect of note-making, drop a comment below or write to us using Ask Toppers Anything on the bottom right of your screen. We will get on it pronto.
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