Different from the notes in high school, powerpoints made by professors in universities are not used to help students to memorize or understand the materials, but mainly help the lecturer to give the presentations and/or just remind students what topics have been taught in lessons. It is common that professors are too busy to make their powerpoints precise and concise for revision of exams, and they do not have the responsibility to do so as well. So it may not be a good idea for you to read college powerpoints in a high school approach. Moreover, it is very possible that one course provides you with 1000 slides of powerpoint, and if you take four courses this semester, it means you will probably face thousands of powerpoint during the exam period. And you still have other materials and reference books to deal with. It is crucial to read and understand the powerpoints fast enough in order to completely cover the syllabus of your exam.

Here I want to share with you the 6 ways which can help me to deal with the powerpoints/ppt more efficiently.

• 1) Photocopy the ppt

Ppt on paper can help us to mark the main points and jot down important notes easily. If you use computer to read them, you are very likely to “browse” it by just continuously clicking the page down button. It is more troublesome to do markings like circles, cross, ticks or underlines with a mouse pointer than directly using a pen, particularly when the ppt is made by Adobe Acrobat and you cannot do any edition. If you just casually read the ppt and do not mark anything, I wonder how much of the content you can remember after the revision. This is just like watching TV – a passive process of being fed up by information without active analysis of each piece of information and integration of new knowledge to what you have known. You have to be consciously aware of what you are reading in order to form solid memory.

• 2) Photocopy the ppt, but 24 slides in one page!

If most of the students surrounding you print their ppt 6 slides per page, you may subconsciously feel that it is rather bizarre to print it 24 slides per page. But there is no reason to stick to the rule if you cannot find any obvious advantages. Have a try on 24slides/page and see what you will feel about that. Of course, you will have to make appropriate settings when you print it in order to maximize the size of each slide on a paper.

A very obvious advantage of 24slides/page is that you will have more information in one page, and the content of one whole chapter can be generally minimized to less than 5 pages. You can then look at the content from a much broader view. Just by glancing these 5 pages and the big, bolded titles, you can very soon catch hold of the main points of the chapter, and you will be very clear about the sequence or logic the professor is going to apply in this chapter. It is very important to know about how the professor is going to explain a problem or theory as it is the place where you can be critical for. If you are using 6slides/page, most of the time you are just focusing on a small module of knowledge, and generally you cannot make any comment on it, since it is something absolutely right.

For example, in a chapter of astronomy, page 1 (slides1-6) explains water’s importance for life on Earth, page 2 explains atmosphere is also crucial for favorable environment for life. That is why life exists on Earth. If you just look at page 1 or page 2 independently, it is likely that you will accept the concepts immediately because both of them are fact, and the conclusion is correct too. But if you can read all the content of page 1, page 2 and conclusion at the same time on one page, you may start to think more about the logic, or at least why the topics are put forward in the same chapter. Does it mean water (page 1) is more important than atmosphere (on page 2)? Probably it is not the case, and historically an atmosphere may form earlier than sea. Is that water and atmosphere are two independent factors? Without atmosphere, water can hardly be retained on Earth’s surface. Is that water and atmosphere are sufficient for life formation? Saturn and Jupiter are made up of thick atmosphere and ocean, but life probably does not exist there. Finally, are water and atmosphere the most essential for life? Perhaps they are, but the more basic principle is the distance between the Sun and Earth. If they are too near, water will all evaporate and the atmosphere will be blown away by solar wind.

Hope you can get my point from the previous example. In college, it is more important to learn the linkage between the facts, instead of the facts themselves, no matter you are studying science, history or economics. Why do we bother so much about the facts, while primary school students can easily check out the facts by Google and Wikipedia? With all the main points, hypothesis, argument and conclusion within 5 pages, 24slides/page can help you to develop a sense of awareness on the logical relationship between the points, and increase your ability to challenge them. If you are already a talented student aware of linkages between facts, 24slides/page will help you to strengthen your awareness. Symbols like arrows can be used to specify the relationship between some slides.

Besides having more information on one page, another obvious advantage of 24slides/page is having the same amount of information in fewer pages. If you have 1000slides in a course, you will have around 160pages for 6slides/page. (For those who still prefer 4slides/page will have 250pages.) Merely moving from one page to another will cost you a lot of invaluable time during the exam preparation period (it takes 159 turns). Moreover, the large amount of pages is somewhat a great burden, both physically and mentally. I feel really funny when I see that the pile of ppt notes of some students can be even higher than the textbooks. However, you will only have 40pages for 24slides/page and 20pages if you print on both sides. You can conveniently put all your notes in your bag and tell your peers, “1000slides only, so what?”

There are also some more advantages of having fewer pages. If you are an environmentalist, 24slides/page can help you to save a lot of wood. If you are having an open book exam, you can easily find out the key points instead of turning over the 160pages nervously. When you are taking a train or waiting for a bus, you can conveniently take out the notes and review the key points quickly. If your printer’s speed is slow, you can save a lot of time (and ink) in printing…

Of course there are some drawbacks for 24slides/page, particularly when some lazy professors stuff a lot of words in their ppt and just read it out during the lecture. These problems may include:

Q: The words are too small to be seen clearly.
A: Try to maximize the size of each page by changing the printing settings.
Generally, the smaller the words, the less important they are.

Q: The figures and diagrams cannot be printed clearly.
A: Okay, just print it separately by 4slides/page, or read it in the computer.

Q: I do not have enough space to drop notes.
A: If you have so many things to drop down, it may be better to use your own notebook.

Q: I feel quite terrible when I see there are 24 slides per page. It takes so much time for me to go through one page.
A: Do you feel more comfortable when you have 1600 pages instead of 200pages?
You can use appropriate symbols to mark the importance of a slide, as stated in the next part of my essay. Put less time on slides which are less important.

Of course, if the ppt is completely made up small words like ants or mini diagrams which require high-resolution eyeballs, or if the purpose of the ppt is to completely replace the textbook, it would be better to choose 4slides/page instead.

• 3) Delete useless slides

I believe that out of 1000slides, over 500 of them are useless. To me, it is very normal to delete over 75% of the slides. I do not mean that the professors intentionally put useless slides in the ppt. Just that some slides are not useful in helping us to revise and memorize the content.

Here, I have to make it clear that the #1 rule of deleting slides is: Make sure you understand what the slide talks about before you delete any of them!

Useless slides include:
a)Repetitive slides. One kind of repetitive slide are those professors use to remind the students important concepts during the lecture. They are not very useful during revision. Another kind of repetitive slides are those which talk about the same thing by different diagrams/wordings. Once you have got the point, delete them. If you print ppt by 24slides/page, it will be easier to find out repetitive slides in different pages and chapters.
b)Pictures. These slides aim to give students an impression what the true objects are like, or to make the lecture more interesting.
c)Things you have already learnt before. To make the teaching systematic, professors often talk briefly about basic principles you have learnt before starting a new chapter. If you are hard work enough in previous semesters, you do not need to read them again.
d)Things that is unnecessary to be memorized. These may include table of data, results of individual experiments, a list of chemical names, proof of a formula, etc.

How to “delete” a slide? Simply use a big stroke is okay, which takes only a millisecond. Better not to make the slide unrecognizable, in case you may need it again in the future, or it may be useful during open book exam.

When you read the ppt the second time, totally ignore the slides which have been deleted. This is the main purpose of deleting slides: to save time in reading things you already know and understand. I do not mean that you can delete everything you have understood, if so you can just burn away my notes. You can delete something which has already become a part of your knowledge system, or common sense.

Sometimes when there are too many useless pages in ppt, alternatively I use big ticks to mark the useful pages, instead of crossing out so many useless pages. Just focus on the slides with tick and ignore those without a tick when you read it next time. You will save a lot of time in differentiating whether you should read it again or not when you read the ppt next time.

• 4) Circle the key words

Here, key words do not mean main points. You underline the main points, which may be a phrase or sentence with effective information, but you put a big circle on the key words, which is the main character in the slide and is useful in reminding you the main points of the slide. When you read the ppt next time, key words with a big circle will first catch your eyeball and you should try to see if you can remember the related main points. Generally, circling the best key words can help you a lot in organizing and memorizing the content. If you can memorize all the key words, you should be able to copy the ppt without looking at it, even you may miss a few details. Key words serve to assist memorization, not just tell you the information.

• 5) When you meet a problem, leave a question mark, then go on

It is not a good habit to stop frequently and look up for answers of trivial questions when you are doing revision. Put a question mark beside and solve all the problems together after you have finished the whole chapter of ppt, unless you think that the specific question will severely interfere your understanding on the remaining part if left unanswered. In fact, in most of the time, it is difficult for us to find out the answer of a question immediately, and you may soon feel exhausted if you keep on finding answers for many questions during revision. Focus is the key point of efficiency, because short term memory is necessary to form linkage between different parts of newly learnt knowledge. Once you are interrupted, you may lose your temporary memory of things you have just read, and fail to relate them to things you are going to read, which is important for forming long term memory.

• 6) Set up your goal to shorten your time on reading ppt

If you use 2 hours to revise a chapter of ppt during the first time, after using the two methods “delete useless slides” and “circle the key words”, you should be able to finish the ppt within 30min in the second time, and 15min in the third time. The ppt becomes thinner when you are clearer about what you should pay more or less or none attention on. The markings are important in helping you to differentiate what is important and what is useless. If you do not mark anything, you will read every word on every slide again next time, and find that revision is so tedious.

Finally, I should remind you that reading ppt is not sufficient, if your aim is to learn well, but not merely achieve high scores in exams. ?

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