How to take notes in lectures, seminars, tutorials and labs

Short answer first. A lecture note captures the shape of an argument, because one person is delivering it to a room and you need its structure. A seminar note captures what other people said, because the objections are the content. A tutorial or supervision note captures the corrections to work you already handed in. A lab book records what you actually did, in pen, as you do it. A placement note records what you learned without recording who you learned it from. A crit note captures the feedback in the words it was given.

Same degree, six different jobs. Nearly all note-taking advice assumes a lecture theatre, and the lecture theatre is often not where the marks are decided.

What does a week at a UK university actually contain?

Your timetable is not one format repeated. Cambridge's undergraduate guide lays out the rooms plainly, and although the names differ elsewhere, the shapes are the same at most UK universities.

• Lectures. "They usually last around 50 minutes." One person speaking, often to a large room.
• Seminars and classes. "Used to discuss topics in detail", "usually for a group of 10-30 students", "around 1-2 hours long".
• Supervisions. "A small group discussion about the topic you're studying", usually an hour, prepared for by "reading, writing an essay or working on some problems". Oxford calls the same thing a tutorial. Everywhere else it is a tutorial, a small-group class or a personal tutor meeting.
• Practicals. Lab classes, for the courses that have them.
• The hours nobody timetables. Cambridge tells applicants to "expect to spend a minimum of 35 hours per week on independent study and contact time".

Open your timetable and count the contact hours that are not lectures. That number is how much of your week has no note-taking method behind it.

Lectures: what do you write when you cannot write everything?

Sussex's Skills Hub starts before the room. Do the background reading, look at the slides on the VLE if they are posted in advance, and bring a question. Then, in the lecture, do not try to write everything down. Sussex describes good lecture notes as "an interpretation of the material", labelled with the date and the title, with headings, specific examples, and a list of unfamiliar terms to look up later.

Decide what you are writing before it starts

The lecturer's slides already exist. The note has to capture what is not on them.

• The skeleton. The sections and the question each one answers.
• What was said out loud but is not on the slide. The aside, the qualification, the reasoning between two bullet points. This exists nowhere else.
• Worked examples in full. Including the steps that looked obvious while you were watching.
• A mark in the margin for anything you did not follow. It keeps you moving instead of stalling on one line.

Leeds' library lists what a good note contains: source information, headings, "key points, examples, names, new ideas", triggers such as colour or drawings, and further reading to follow up. Leeds also splits the job into before, during and after, and the after step is "Reflect and review and then organise your notes". Layout matters less than that step, which is why the Cornell method puts a question column beside the notes and a summary underneath. It is a lecture format. It does not suit a lab and it does not suit a seminar, and the rest of this article explains why.

Within 24 hours

Sussex is direct about timing: going over your notes in the days following a lecture makes a marked difference to what you retain, and rewriting them purely for neatness does not. Reading's library says to "put some time aside soon after the lecture to sit somewhere quiet" and summarise the main points, then follow up anything important and file the notes where you can find them.

Twenty minutes, same day. Read the page once. Turn every margin mark into a question you can answer or cannot. The ones you cannot go on a list for the seminar.

Seminars: what do you write when you are being marked for talking?

A seminar is not a small lecture, and writing it as one gives you a worse copy of a note you already own. It is also, in some modules, assessed.

Edinburgh's English Literature department publishes descriptors for class participation, which "counts for 10% of the overall grade for the course". The descriptors assess preparation, contribution and engagement. The bottom band "provides no evidence of preparation" and "makes no contribution to discussion". The top band offers "critically acute, perceptive and sophisticated contributions". The department also says contributions need not be exclusively verbal, for students with adjustments. Kent's Classics handbook is more relaxed about form: "There are lots of contributions that count, including questioning, listening, and responding", and it tells students to generate questions and comments in advance.

Prepare questions, not summaries. Arrive with the two questions the reading left you with, written down, so you have something to say in the first ten minutes rather than the last two. Use one of them. That is the participation mark, and it is the cheapest 10 per cent on the module.

What goes on the page

• The question, in the words it was asked in. The wording is half of what is being taught.
• The answer that was wrong, and the sentence that fixed it. A wrong answer corrected in front of you shows the boundary of the concept.
• Objections to your own position, in the objector's words. Not your paraphrase. The one you could not answer goes at the top of the page and becomes the counterargument section of your essay.
• Anything a classmate said that you would not have thought of. Gone by tomorrow otherwise.
• Anything about the assessment, word for word, with the date. In week ten, when your memory of the brief and the brief itself disagree, you want the sentence.

Then stop. You are not transcribing the tutor. Half the page should be blank and your eyes should be on the room.

Tutorials and supervisions: why is the note mostly about your own essay?

Cambridge's description is the useful one. You prepare "by reading, writing an essay or working on some problems", then spend an hour with a specialist and one to three other students on that work. Oxford's tutorial is the same shape with a different name. Most other UK universities run something looser, a personal tutor meeting or a small-group problem class, but the logic holds wherever feedback on your own work is the point of the hour.

That changes the note completely. In a lecture you receive a position. In a tutorial you defend one, and the content of the hour is the gap between what you wrote and what the tutor thinks.

1. Before. One page: your claim, the evidence for it, and the weakest link in the chain. Naming the weak link yourself is the exercise, and a tutor will find it in the first five minutes if you do not.
2. During. Write down every correction as a pair: what you wrote, what it should have been. Write down the phrasing the tutor accepted, not just the idea.
3. The question you could not answer. Circle it. That is next week's reading.
4. Within 24 hours. Rewrite the claim so it survives the corrections. If it cannot be rewritten, you have learned more than a tidy page would have taught you, and you have a paragraph for the exam.

Keep a running list of your own recurring errors across the term. By week six the list is short and the same three things are on it. That list is worth more in the revision period than any set of lecture notes, and it feeds straight into how to prepare for exams at a UK university.

Labs and practicals: what has to be in the lab book?

The lab is the one format where the note records an event rather than an idea, and where marks attach to it directly.

Oxford's Department of Materials puts the notebook on the mark sheet. It is marked out of 3 for every practical, most notebooks get 2 for accurately recording the experiment, and the marks are examinable coursework that students must pass to progress. The guide's advice on what the book should look like is the best short statement of the genre. "A lab notebook should not contain long paragraphs of text. It is not a report and you won't have time to write extended text while doing the experiments." Permanent ink, ideally black, because pencil can be erased. Numbered pages. Date and time for each session. And the warning every first year needs: "Do not be tempted to use a 'draft' lab notebook, for example on loose paper, and then write up something more polished at the end of the practical." It earns no extra marks and it is not how a working lab runs.

Birmingham's School of Physics says the same thing from a different bench. Students buy bound A4 notebooks, and the book is "your diary of everything that you have actually done in your experiments. It is not intended for 'writing up' experiments." Record the date at the start of each day, the experiment name, the bench number, the apparatus numbers, zero errors, and actual data rather than derived data. On mistakes: "Don't remove results that later prove to be wrong: put a single line through them and add a note stating why they were wrong." And do not reproduce the manual.

Reading's MPharm guide adds the health and safety half: "Write an SOP and COSHH for every experiment that you want to undertake in the lab if not already available", and "You should write your notes in your book in the lab at the time you are doing the experiment, not later on."

The three-column bench note

Put those together and the method writes itself. Run three columns.

1. What the instructions say to do. Refer to the briefing sheet by page rather than copying it. Oxford and Birmingham both say not to reproduce the manual.
2. What you actually did. Deviations, the reagent you substituted, the instrument that needed recalibrating, and your reason for any change, written in as they happen.
3. What you observed, with units and times. Full sentences for anything odd. File names and locations for anything the computer recorded.

Column two is the one everybody skips and the one the write-up needs, because the method section of a report has to describe the experiment that happened rather than the one that was planned. Column three is where the discussion comes from, and the anomaly that is obvious at the bench on Tuesday is gone by Sunday. Oxford's closing advice for every session is a single test: are you confident you could write a full report from these notes?

The write-up comes later. Oxford's long reports follow the journal format, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, with a 3,000 word limit. You do not write that the same day. What you do the same day is check the book against the test above, transcribe the raw numbers into a spreadsheet while you can still read your own handwriting, and note which observation in column three you cannot yet explain. That unexplained observation is the discussion section.

One more thing from Oxford's list of lab rules: "DON'T use your mobile phone." That settles the recording question for the lab before you ask it.

Placements: what do you write when you cannot record anyone?

Nursing, midwifery, teaching and social work students spend large parts of the degree in rooms full of people who are not there to be studied. The rules come from the profession, not the university, and they are stricter than any lecture policy.

The NMC Code applies to registered nurses and midwives, and nursing students are held to it on placement because it is what they are being assessed against. Clause 5.1: "respect a person's right to privacy in all aspects of their care". Clause 20.10: "use all forms of spoken, written and digital communication (including social media and networking sites) responsibly, respecting the right to privacy of others at all times". Clause 10.1, on records: "complete all records at the time or as soon as possible after an event". For trainee teachers, the Teachers' Standards are used to assess "all trainees working towards QTS", and Part Two requires "having regard for the need to safeguard pupils' well-being" and "observing proper boundaries appropriate to a teacher's professional position".

None of that says "do not record". It does not need to. A phone recording a ward round or a Year 4 classroom captures patients and children who did not consent, and Reading's own recording guidance names exactly these situations, client confidentiality and children, as the ones where recording is inappropriate.

The placement notebook

• Learning, not people. Write what you learned about the condition, the technique, the classroom strategy. No names, no dates of birth, no bed numbers, no anything that identifies a patient or a pupil.
• Reflection, same day. What you did, what you would do differently, what you need to ask your mentor. Most programmes assess reflective writing and this is its raw material.
• Questions for the university. The gap between the textbook and the ward goes in a list you bring back to the seminar.
• Where the book lives. Not on a shared drive, not photographed into a chat, and, if it is on a phone, not in an app that uploads it anywhere.

Paper is the safest format on a placement, and in most placements the only one your mentor will be comfortable seeing.

Studios and crits: what do you write when the feedback is about your work?

Art, architecture and design students meet the crit instead of the tutorial. A group presents work and a panel of tutors and peers responds. The London College of Communication's teaching hub describes one version, run online during a period of remote teaching: each student in a group of four or five presented for five minutes, then the cohort worked through everyone's boards posting questions and observations, with the feedback "saved in the margins of their work". A study in the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education calls group crits a "signature pedagogy" of art education and notes that the literature aimed at students suggests there are still problems with how they work.

The most common of those problems is that the student presenting hears nothing. You are defending the work, you are anxious, and the one comment that would have changed the project is gone by the time you sit down. The fix is to stop trying to remember.

1. Ask a friend to write. Every crit, swap. They record the feedback on your work in the panel's words and you do the same for them.
2. Separate the comment from your reaction. Two columns. What was said, and what you think about it. The second column is for later.
3. Within 24 hours. Turn each comment into a decision: act on it, argue against it in your process journal, or park it. A comment with no decision beside it will be raised again at the next crit.

Can you record any of it?

The lecture is usually recordable, with or without asking depending on where you are. Dundee's policy lets all students audio record any lecture, and then draws the line: for small-group teaching with student participation, routine recording is not permitted without the knowledge and express permission of the group. St Mary's expects students without a disability to ask before recording a lecture and to tell the lecturer before a seminar, and if someone in the group objects, the group has to find another adjustment. Reading permits audio recording of lectures and leaves every other session to the member of staff, with confidentiality and children as the named exceptions.

The reason is not bureaucratic. In a seminar you would be recording 20 classmates who did not agree to it, one of whom may be saying something wrong in order to learn. In a tutorial you would be recording your own essay being taken apart. On a placement you would be recording patients. The wording differs between universities and it is worth reading yours, which is what recording lectures in the UK does institution by institution. The practical rule is simple. Record the lecture, with permission where your university requires it. Everywhere else, write.

How do you pull six notebooks back into one module?

The UK academic year does not leave room to sort this out at the end. A typical semester is 11 or 12 teaching weeks, then a short gap, then exams, and the gap has to serve every module at once. Reconciling six kinds of note in that week is not a plan.

The weekly page

Do it weekly instead. Twenty minutes per module, one page.

• The lecture's argument, in three sentences. If you cannot get it to three, you did not follow it.
• The seminar objection you could not answer. In the objector's words.
• The tutorial correction you did not see coming. And the pattern it belongs to on your running list.
• The lab observation you cannot explain. Or the placement question for the university, or the crit comment you have not yet decided about.
• The open questions. Carried forward until they are gone.

That page is the only one of the six notebooks that is automatically in your own words, because nobody else sat through your combination of confusions. Turn the open questions into cards and start active recall in week three rather than in the revision week. If the module goes badly in January, the notes from October are what you will be resitting from in August.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards with spaced repetition. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which covers the slides and the lab briefing sheet. It transcribes 89 languages including British English. The free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month, and a full term of 50-minute lectures means Pro at 9.99 euro a month with a seven-day trial, or 99.99 euro a year, billed in euro rather than pounds. Uploads are capped at 50 MB, and long recordings are split into 30-minute files on the phone and joined into one transcript.

Audio is stored in the EU and sent to processors in the United States to be transcribed, so it is the wrong place for anything from a placement, and you need the lecturer's permission before you record. It helps in the room where one person is speaking. In the seminar, the tutorial, the lab, the ward and the crit, the writing is still yours to do. There is more on the recording side at lecture recording.