How to Study From Notes Someone Else Wrote

Before you study from someone else’s notes, audit them. Lay them beside the slides or syllabus to see what they cover, get every abbreviation explained while the writer still remembers it, mark what they left out, and check each testable fact against a source. Only then turn the checked version into questions.

This guide has three situations in mind: a classmate covers a class you missed, a study group splits a module and swaps the write-ups, or someone who took the course last year hands down a folder. In every case, how much the notes are worth depends heavily on how complete and accurate they are, and you can check much of both. Choosing which substitute to reach for after a missed class, and the recovery move once you have one, are covered in catching up on schoolwork after falling behind. This guide covers the part specific to notes somebody else wrote: reading their shorthand, finding what they chose to skip, and keeping their mistakes from becoming yours.

Are someone else’s notes worth studying from?

Yes, and two studies by the educational psychologist Kenneth Kiewra are encouraging, as long as you read them at the scale they were run.

In a 1985 study in Contemporary Educational Psychology with 23 college students, Kiewra compared two learning techniques on immediate and delayed tests. The ERIC abstract of that paper reports that “listening to a lecture and subsequently reviewing the instructor’s notes leads to higher student achievement than taking and reviewing personal lecture notes.” Hold that result to its design. The notes were the instructor’s own, the students had heard the lecture before reviewing them, and this is one small study from four decades ago. It describes the best case for borrowed notes, and a classmate’s page or a missed class sits further from those conditions.

A follow-up in 1988 by Kiewra and colleagues, in the Journal of Educational Psychology, gave 44 undergraduates notes on a lecture to review: a complete text, a linear outline, or a matrix, or else no notes at all. Its ERIC abstract summarizes: “Any form of notes increased performance over no notes, with matrix and outline notes producing higher recall and matrix notes producing greatest transfer.” The form the notes took mattered as well. Those notes, too, were provided by the researchers.

Read together, the two abstracts support one practical point: notes written by another person can carry real study value. Every set in these studies, though, came from the instructor or the research team. A classmate’s set can sit anywhere from close to that standard down to a page of fragments. Completeness and accuracy go a long way toward deciding where it lands, and you can check much of both.

A later paper by Kiewra names what handwritten notes tend to get wrong, and those three failings make a useful checklist. In Note Taking on Trial, published in Educational Psychology Review in 2016, he describes serving as an expert witness in a legal case that hinged partly on the completeness and accuracy of handwritten meeting notes. Based on his own research and that of others, he rendered three opinions about handwritten notes: “They omit most of what is said,” “they omit details, context, and essential qualifiers,” and “they contain inaccuracies or vague statements.” These are an expert’s research-grounded opinions, rendered for a legal case, and they line up with three of the things the audit below tests: coverage, context, and accuracy.

What goes wrong when the notes belong to someone else?

Your own notes have some of the same faults, and the memory of sitting in the room patches most of them, which is the repair pass described in reviewing your notes the day after a class. With a borrowed set, that memory belongs to somebody else, and five problems follow.

Shorthand is the problem with a clock on it. The writer’s memory of what each squiggle meant fades like any other memory of the lecture, so ask this week. The worst move with an unreadable abbreviation is a confident guess. Once you decide that “sig” meant significant, every question built on that line tests your guess, and you will answer it correctly, by your own key, every time.

Invisible gaps are the hardest to find. In your own notes, a blank line marks the point where you fell behind, and you remember the lecturer racing through the last slide. In somebody else’s notes, a topic the writer missed and a topic the lecturer skipped look the same. A slide with no matching note is one or the other, and the writer is the quickest person to ask. So ask them where they fell behind.

Age applies to notes handed down from a previous year. Between one year and the next a reading can be swapped, a topic moved, the weeks reordered, or an assessment reformatted, so treat any topic the current syllabus no longer lists as optional until someone teaching the course confirms it still matters.

How do you check borrowed notes before you study them?

Run the checks in this order, because each one narrows the work for the next. The output is the same set of notes with three kinds of mark in the margin: a tick for a line you confirmed, a correction written beside a line you fixed, and a question mark for a line you could not confirm yet.

1. Map the coverage. Put the notes beside the course’s own skeleton: the slide deck for that session, the week’s line in the syllabus, or the reading list. Tick every heading that has a matching entry in the notes. Whatever is left unticked is your gap list, written down before you have spent an hour on the parts already there.
2. Send the writer one message. Include every abbreviation, symbol, and arrow you cannot read with certainty, plus three questions: where did you fall behind, what did the lecturer stress or repeat, and what did you leave out because you already knew it. The third question finds thin spots that a heading-by-heading comparison can miss.
3. Verify everything you could be tested on. That means definitions, numbers, dates, formulas, named examples, and any rule carrying a qualifier such as usually, always, or except. Check each against the textbook or slides and mark it. Give qualifiers extra suspicion, since a dropped “except” turns a true rule into a false one, and Kiewra lists essential qualifiers among what handwritten notes omit.
4. Fill the gaps from a primary source. For each unticked heading, go to the textbook section or the slides and write a short entry yourself, in a different color or your own handwriting, so you can always tell your additions from the original. Whether to go further and recopy the whole set in your own words is a separate question, and whether rewriting notes is worth the time weighs it. For the audit, margin notes are enough.
5. Send the leftovers upward. Anything still wearing a question mark after the textbook check goes to the lecturer, a teaching assistant, or an office hour, as a short list of specific questions.

When a study group splits a module and swaps write-ups, build the audit into the swap: each person checks another member’s notes against the slides before anyone studies from them, and corrections go back to the writer while they still remember what they heard. Handing out the checking along with the topics is part of running a study group that divides the work well.

Why does the audit come before the questions?

Because questions inherit every error in the notes they are built from. Turning a source into questions and answering them from memory works on borrowed notes as well as on anything else, and the answers you rehearse are whatever the page says.

Suppose the notes say that a price floor set below the equilibrium price creates a surplus. The lecturer said above: a floor below equilibrium has no effect, and the slip is one word long. Every question built from that line asks for the wrong direction, and every correct answer is practice at writing the wrong direction in the exam. A quiz built from unchecked notes is a well-organized way to memorize someone else’s mistake.

So the order is fixed: audit, then generate. Build questions only from lines that carry a tick or a correction, and leave the question-mark lines out of the quiz until they are resolved. This holds for questions you write by hand, questions a friend asks you, and questions software writes, since anyone working from the page alone cannot know which of its lines are wrong.

Can you share and upload someone else’s notes?

Policies on sharing, selling, or posting notes differ between institutions, and sometimes between courses, so check your own institution’s rules before you pass notes on or put them anywhere public.

Two courtesies are worth keeping. Ask before you upload somebody else’s notes to any online tool, since the document is theirs and may carry their name or comments they never meant for a wider audience; what to weigh before uploading notes to an AI tool covers the wider question. And send your corrections back. The writer is probably studying from the same page, and a fixed error is worth as much to them as it is to you.

Where GeniusPal fits with borrowed notes

One boundary first, because it decides whether borrowed notes can go in at all. GeniusPal has no optical character recognition. A photo of a friend’s handwritten notes is refused as an unsupported file type, and a scan with no text layer is refused because it contains no readable text. A handwritten set reaches it only once somebody has typed it up.

It accepts a PDF, a Word (.docx) file, a PowerPoint (.pptx) deck, plain text, Markdown, or CSV, up to 10 MB, or a pasted link to a page. Give it the audited version of the notes, with your corrections typed in and the unresolved lines removed, and it writes questions with answers drawn from that document. It has no way to check the notes against your lecture, so it will ask you about whatever the file says, errors included, which is the whole case for running the audit first. It writes no summaries, draws no mind maps, and holds no conversation about your file.

The free account covers 2 generations for the life of the account, at 10 questions per set, with 2 full runs of each set, and the quiz is multiple choice throughout. The Student plan, at 14.99 dollars a month for 100 generations, adds flashcards, written recall, typed answers inside the quiz that are marked for you, and sets of up to 30 questions. Genius is 59.99 dollars a year, shown as 5.00 dollars a month, under a fair-use ceiling.

The daily review is free on every plan. It gathers up to 20 questions from across your sets and orders them with the ones you missed first, then the ones you have never answered, then the ones still short of mastery. With a borrowed set, check a question you keep missing against the notes once more, since a stubborn miss can trace back to a line that slipped through the audit.