unpopular opinion: making your own notes and flashcards is a waste of time in college

going to get destroyed for this but hear me out.

in high school making your own study materials made sense. the syllabus was small, you had time, and the act of writing things out genuinely helped you remember. your teacher basically told you exactly what was going to be on the test. you could afford to spend a Sunday afternoon making a pretty set of flashcards.

college is a completely different game. you have 6 subjects, 400 slide decks, recorded lectures you're already 3 weeks behind on, a group project nobody is doing, and an exam in 48 hours. there is no world in which you have time to hand-craft beautiful flashcard sets for all of it. and yet every study advice post online is still written like you're a high schooler with infinite free time and a stationery addiction.

the people I know with the best grades don't make their own materials. they find or generate them as fast as possible and spend every remaining minute actually testing themselves. one of them just uploads everything to StudyCheetah and goes straight to the practice questions. another downloads shared Anki decks. another just does past papers from day one. the method doesn't matter, the principle is the same. skip the prep, get to the recall.

and before anyone says "but writing things out helps you remember", yes it does, slightly, during the writing. but you know what works significantly better? actually retrieving information from memory under pressure. we have decades of research on this and nobody talks about it because it's less fun to photograph than a pretty notebook.

we've all been the person with the colour coded binder and four different highlighters. most of us have the GPA to prove it wasn't working.

fight me in the comments