The Note-Taking Habit That's Quietly Costing You IMAT Study Time

Open almost any struggling candidate's study space and one thing tends to stand out: a stack of full, tidy notebooks. Ask what they've been doing for the last few weeks and "making notes" comes up constantly, usually said with a kind of quiet pride. That pride is often misplaced, and it's worth being honest about why.

Short answer: copying content into a notebook trains recognition, not recall, so it feels productive without actually moving your score. What's worth writing down instead is a short list of what you keep getting wrong.

Why it feels like real progress

A notebook filling up with neat paragraphs and diagrams is visible evidence of work. You can flip back through it, compare it to last month's, and it looks exactly like what studying is supposed to look like. That visibility is precisely the problem: it rewards the appearance of progress rather than the thing that actually moves your score, which is being able to produce the right answer under exam conditions without the notebook open in front of you.

What copying content actually trains

Rewriting a textbook page or lecture slide in your own words is a low-effort cognitive task. You're recognizing the information as you transcribe it, not retrieving it from memory, so the exercise mostly trains handwriting speed and a comforting sense of familiarity with the material. That's a genuinely different skill from answering a five-option IMAT question cold, and the gap between the two only shows up once you sit a real mock and the notebook isn't there to lean on.

The one kind of note that's actually worth keeping

Not all note-taking is wasted time. A short, running list of the specific concepts you keep getting wrong, written the moment you notice the gap while you're first working through content, is worth far more than a full transcription of the syllabus. This is different from a mock exam error log, which tracks wrong answers after a timed test. This is built earlier, while you're still learning the material, and it catches the two or three ideas per topic you keep having to look up again before they ever show up on a mock.

How to actually cut the habit

If you're currently taking full notes on every topic, try capping yourself to one page per topic, reserved only for what you got wrong or couldn't explain out loud without checking. Redirect the hours that frees up into practice questions on that same topic. Most candidates already own more written material, in books, slides, and past notes, than they'll ever fully use. What's actually scarce is time spent testing yourself against it.

Keep the notebook, but change what goes in it. The version of you that's ready for the IMAT isn't the one with the most complete notes. It's the one who can close every book and still produce the answer.