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'15 here

I remember having these notes ingrained into my brain in middle school; at Ithaca, I didn't know a single person who actively used Cornell notes for note taking. That said, actively engaging and re-engaging with content will help you build better internal bodies of knowledge on the subject, so you'll retain the content long after prelims and finals.

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Same here. Ithaca schools are just soooo proud of the Cornell note taking system they taught it to us as if it was eternal and essential, but ultimately useless, just like cursive.

I also went to Cornell and never saw it used or mentioned once.

Same! '11, never saw a single person use it. Old prelims > graded psets > notes, to me anyways.

I remember those back in middle school. My history teacher beat on us relentlessly to do them, to the point of having large stacks of paper with lines down the middle in the room and handing out bundles of the same at regular intervals. No one did it unless she was checking for a grade, which was infrequent. I did well in the class, and neither I nor the other A students took notes this way. Just sometimes wrote in the margins like normal people, or underlined something important, then put these into separate documents. Having a sheet of the synthesized "metadata" (dates, contextual bits, etc.) was much more useful than having to page through to get at the information.

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