Comment by WalterBright
3 hours ago
I've given this advice many times, and the ones who followed it did well. I only added "leave your laptop in your dorm room" for modern times.
The general pattern at Caltech was 2 hours of study for every hour of lecture. Which was quite a shock to me.
I'll add one more thing to this, given that my experience as a math major at SIU was that each hour of lecture was expected to carry four hours of studying: read and summarize the course's texts (additionally, for math courses, attempt the problems) before lecture.
I found that (1) I didn't need to take anywhere near as many notes during lecture and (2) I could ask way, way, way more relevant questions.
This also helped tremendously when it came to studying for the actuarial exams.