Note-taking is not everyone’s favorite task, but it can help immensely in organizing the dense material students need to cover to achieve their target scores on the GMAT.

It’s important to take notes on lessons, summaries and questions you encounter in your studies.

The simplest way to hone your note-taking skills is to begin with the summaries you encounter in the Economist GMAT Tutor course. Even though the summaries that are shown after you complete a topic provide a nice overview of each section, you should take your own notes as well. This will help you retain the material and organize the information in a manner that makes sense to you.

I suggest that you use a table format with the following columns:

  • Topic (e.g. parallelism)
  • Stop sign (e.g. list of objects)
  • The associated rule to employ when you see the stop sign (First, check that the list of objects are all the same part of speech)
  • Incorrect example
  • Correct example

To help you understand and remember the lesson, the example questions you write in your table should be your own, rather than a copy and paste from the course.

Notes in Critical Reasoning

In general, if a sentence is too long, you should break it down into small, manageable bits and take brief notes on each section. You should summarize briefly; do not rewrite anything.

For example, Boldface Type Questions require very careful reading of the material. You should think about the relationships among the sentences to see how each boldface section relates to the other portions of the passage. On your notes, scribble down the key points, including:

  • Is the boldface section a premise or conclusion?
  • Does it agree with or negate anything that came before or after it?
  • What purpose does the first boldface section serve and what is its relationship to the other boldface and to the other sentences?

Notes in Reading Comprehension

Taking notes in the Reading Comprehension section can be very useful. Since more than 95% of all correct answers for Main Idea and Structure questions come from the first two sentences of the paragraphs, your first step is to read the first two sentences of each paragraph and take notes on each.

Make sure you only paraphrase and do not copy everything word-for-word. The point is is to get a brief summary of what you have read.

Pay attention to any of sentences that have opposition conjunctions like however, but and although. This should be enough for a general mapping of the text and should help you locate many of the detail-related questions.

Before you get the hang of note-taking, don’t worry about timing. Your timing will improve as you practice. Most people complain about the fact that note-taking takes more time, but in the end, it will actually save you time and make you more precise.