College Study Hints
or
How to Prevent Homework From Screwing Up Real Life

How to Read Faster & Retain More
How to Mark Books
How to Take Notes in Class
How to Study With Computers
How to Prepare for Exams

Other Stuff About Class Life
Sleeping Your Way to an A
All About Office Hours
All About Grades
Appendix: Who Are Professors?

How to Study With Computers

Okay, so you got a new computer as a high school graduation present, or as a hand-me down from your wealthy great uncle, or in a drawing at the mall, or in a fit of enthusiasm. Can it help you do something that profits you academically? The answer, as for most questions, is both yes and no:

Part I: Your Computer As Window

The world-wide pandemic of 2020 resulted in most classes at all levels and around the world being cancelled or moved on-line. Suddenly a computer became a necessity. For most students that meant a laptop. (Rich students bought high-end Apple machines. Poor or thrifty students bought much cheaper Chromebooks. Other people bought Windows PCs. For practical purposes, they were interchangeable.)

Typically a class would be conducted using Zoom or equivalent software, which would allow each participant to see the instructor and other students in little boxes on the laptop screen.

The Up Side. Very few people thought this was ideal, but some people did discover a few advantages. For example, each on-screen Zoom box had the participant’s name on it, so classes were less anonymous. Also, many classes were recorded for later podcasting —they were “asynchronous,” in administrative jargon— and could be watched more than once. (You always wanted to attend the same class over and over, right?) When they weren’t, it was typically possible for a student to make his or her own recording.

The Down Side. On the negative side, there was probably never a class where everybody could make the software work perfectly. Furthermore, many students found it was hard to concentrate on a lecture delivered on a little screen, even if they had a quiet place to work (which they didn't always), and “in-class discussion” took serious getting used to. Lab classes and performance classes were especially artificial. The possibility of participants making recordings or taking screen shots raised disturbing copyright concerns for professors and privacy concerns for students. And everybody worried about how grades and exams would work, about how cheating would be detected, and about other issues related to evaluation rather than learning.

Best Practices. Obviously different kinds of classes present different challenges. But in general serious students report that they benefit most when they do the following:

Attend in person rather than remotely if you can be on campus and a class is offered both ways (i.e., if it is a “hybrid” class).
Ideally you have desk and ideally it is not too cluttered to support your laptop. But whether desk or dining table or back seat of your car, it is useful to have a quiet place to open your computer with space left over to set a notepad and perhaps open a book. Obviously, it’s not critical to have a cool background behind you, but we all know that being cool is never bad thing. (Observation: Messy is not inherently cool.)
Attend the class as it happens rather than depending on a later podcast. For one thing, it allows you to ask questions. For another, it reduces your natural inclination to procrastinate.
Keep your camera on throughout the class. When you are visible, the instructor knows that you are actually there. (It would be embarrassing to be called on because you are suspected of slipping out for coffee, especially if you actually did slip out. Besides, you are beautiful, right?) However, in some classes bandwidth is a problem, and some or all of the participants may need to shut down their cameras to preserve it. The instructor or technical facilitator will keep track of this. Meanwhile, to the extent that the choice is yours and technology permits, a camera turned on will help you learn better than a camera turned off. (Exception: Be sure the camera is OFF if you carry the laptop on a potty break.)
Use your real name, not a pseudonym, if the software puts your name under your picture. Remember that your pseudonym doesn’t need attendance credit. You do.

For on-line courses, attendance and participation tend to become especially important, and (as everywhere else) the world does not reward the shy.

Participate more than you usually do unless it is a big lecture class. Professors tend to think students in on-line classes are not paying full attention (which is probably true, although it involves the rather touching assumption that they do pay full attention in in-person classes). With exams and grading being so challenging for on-line courses, attendance and participation tend to become especially important, and (as everywhere else) the world does not reward the shy.
Keep your microphone off except when speaking. Extraneous sounds —the pizza delivery guy, dogs barking at the pizza delivery guy, your roommate flirting with the pizza delivery guy, your roommate’s music playing, your other roommate’s complaining about the first roommate’s music, or whatever— can be obtrusive in on-line classes. And two people speaking at once are rarely intelligible. (This makes in-class discussion even more “mannered” than usual —taking turns is critical— but one learns to live with it.)
Avoid the chat box unless the instructor specifically encourages its use. It is very hard for an instructor to keep track of a chatbox while also conducting a class, and the frustration can lead to grouchiness. There is no point in making yourself a target of professorial grouchiness. (For that matter it is also hard for you to keep track of the chatbox if you are also trying to attend to whatever else is happening in the class.) In face-to-face classes students often confer with their neighbors innocently enough. (What page was that? Did she say it was due Wednesday? How do you spell Irkutsk?) Sometimes the chatbox can be a substitute, but don’t let it become a distraction, and don’t expect the instructor to be looking at it.
Don’t try to multitask by doing email or shopping or whatever in another window. It doesn’t contribute to your education any better in virtual classes than it does in in-person classes. (See below.) (The jury is out on taking notes in a separate window. On the whole, it seems to work fine, but so does taking notes on a piece of paper in front of the computer, which is often faster and easier.)

Part II: Your Computer As Your Enemy

Recreational computer activities (music, Email, text-messaging, gaming, on-line shopping, MyFace, &c.), although (mostly) perfectly legitimate ways to spend recreational time, easily work as distractions from mastering the material you need to understand in order to do well in the courses you are taking. This happens in a couple of ways:

You can use the various recreational possibilities of the computer to defer doing needed class preparation. Procrastination is one of the greatest obstacles to student success —maybe the greatest— and you probably do enough of it without electronic assistance.
Taking class notes on a computer makes it hard to copy diagrams or draw arrows.
A study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology used electroencephalogram sensors to study the brains of 36 students when they were writing by hand and when they were using a keyboard. The study “showed that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patters are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard. … In particular, the patterns of connectivity were more complex in the parts of the brain that form memories and encode new information.” (Quoted in The Week, Feb. 16, 2024, p. 21.) The researchers strongly recommended writing over typing as a way to remember what one is recording.
These points can be combined: If you try to “take notes” in class (or in the library or pretty much anywhere) with the computer you are likely to get distracted playing solitaire or doing Email or surfing the web rather than paying attention, but you will also probably remember less even if you don’t get distracted. (Repeated studies have shown that multi-tasking works better for young students than for old professors, but that it doesn't work really well for anybody. Your roommate may claim to work better while multitasking, but your roommate is also an Olympic-level ninny. There's a lot of that going around.)

Multi-tasking works better for young students than for old professors, but it doesn't work really well for anybody.

Research announced in 2009 strongly suggested that the use of the social media site MySpace alone was correlated with a GPA difference of about half a grade among college students. Users, for example, might have a GPA of 3.0, while matched non-users might have 3.5. Presumably studies of FaceBook and Twitter (=X) would produce comparable results. The cause was almost certainly due to attempted multi-tasking. As a rule of thumb, it seems likely that in-class computer multitasking probably results in a drop of about half a grade, for example from A- to B+ or from C to C-.

Computer multitasking probably results in a GPA drop of about half a grade, for example from A- to B+ or from C to C-.

Your computer can also be your enemy in another way: As a source of information, it can deceive you with foolishness and falsehood. Most professors think this happens far more often than it really does. (Professors probably deceive students with more foolishness and falsehood than the Internet does, but that is not something anybody really wants to investigate. Talk about embarrassing!) Therefore you must be constantly skeptical —"critical" is the preferred university buzzword— and ask yourself about whether what you are viewing on-line makes sense to you, and what sources of information it is based on, how trustworthy the author probably is, and what the probability is that an error is likely to be corrected if a site is wrong.

Finally, because so much is available on-line, it is easy to copy stuff. That too smoothly merges into plagiarism, which leads as directly as the university authorities can manage to getting you kicked out. More about plagiarism and other academic no-nos can be learned from a separate page on that subject, complete with true and sad, if darkly amusing, case histories of a hapless soul named Jimmy Gimmie. (Link)

Return to top.

Part III: Your Computer As Your Friend

Computer As Fancy Typewriter. A computer can be used to prepare class assignments, of course. It even has a spell-checker. (Use it, dammit!) But we all know that it is far more helpful than that.

On-Line Research Resources. The Internet provides the best access in human history to nearly every kind of information. And Internet resources are not limited to what you already use or know about, no matter who you are.

If you are on a college campus (or use a VPN client or follow the instructions on the university library web site to activate the "proxy server" function in your web browser so that you fool the Internet into thinking you are on campus), then you have university-paid access to a vast world of subscriber-only professional journals and library collections, yet further increasing your access to responsible scholarship on all topics. (The most conspicuous example is JStore, but there is lots more.)

Basically, every university in the world today has a bigger and better library than any university in the world did thirty years ago. (Wow!) Learning to exploit it is not rocket science. Not bothering to exploit it is just stupid. (You are not stupid, right?)

On-Line Class Materials. For better or worse, in most classes some needed material (including reading lists, assignments, and whatnot) is posted on a class web site. Some of it is static enough it can be printed out, but some of it (usually the best of it) changes constantly or is interactive, and your computer provides excellent access to it.

Every university in the world today has a bigger and better library than any university in the world did thirty years ago.

Nowadays many assigned readings are on the Internet, and more soon will be as publishers join the rush to provide Internet resources that can't be sold as used books at the end of the term. (They sell you a password that expires. Publishers have been looking for something like this ever since the first public library let more than one person read the same book.)

In addition to on-line materials from established publishers, the Internet is full of valuable (and spurious) material, including lots of “unpublished” essays and research results on academic web sites. Some of these may be required or recommended reading in your courses. (Caution: Web sites mysteriously vanish all the time. If you find something really useful, you cannot depend upon it remaining available years later. Many browsers let you make a static file copy on your own computer. You may wish to experiment with this, but remember that the internal links probably won't work.)

Taking Notes. Some students prefer to print out the electronic materials, on the theory that it is easier to take notes on a paper copy, with its attractively empty margins, than on an electronic version. In my most recent term-end survey, in 2019, most students still preferred paper and pen to any computerized note-taking software or machinery. Is paper really best? Maybe.

Other students have got used to using an ordinary word processor, or a dedicated note-taking program, and simply shifting between the window being read and their note-taking window. Some students have specifically recommended Microsoft's OneNote (Link) (packaged with the student version of Office or sold separately) and the freeware TiddlyWiki (Link). A little web browsing will bring you to other possibilities, including the cloud-storage programs Evernote and Google Keep.)

Unlike paper notes, with an electronic note file it is easy to insert URLs, to cut and paste passages, or even to copy a map. However most such programs don’t provide easy links to specific parts of the source being read, so it takes some getting used to and it requires creative use of search terms to make this truly efficient. In an all-paper world, you can jot down a a source and page number. In a digital world, a URL and search string can make more sense. Experiment with your options early in the term; do NOT procrastinate on the assumption that an untried system will turn out to save you from the Final Exam Monster just because your cousin liked it four years ago.

Semi-Computers. Some students experiment with smart phones, PDAs, and various kinds of electronic readers and tablets. Although an occasional student claims that it "works fine" to do the day's readings on a smart phone in the bus on the way to campus, most students, in the end, dismiss such semi-computers as inadequate substitutes for the real thing in at least some of the tasks students need to be able to accomplish. (Nobody tries to write a termpaper on a smart phone and lives to tell about it, as far as I can discover.)

Nobody tries to write a termpaper on a smart phone and lives to tell about it.

Because they do not have cursors, tablets and smart phones cannot respond as a laptop or desktop computer can to "hovering" the cursor over part of the screen (for example to reveal a picture caption or a problem solution), and some have limited character sets that may turn accented letters into blanks. Some cannot display some kinds of videos. Experiment carefully before you depend on a given machine. If you have a machine you like but that is no good for something you only rarely need, you can always supplement by using a student computer lab. All universities still have them.