What's the best way to write legal studies notes? Hand-written or typed?
Might sound like a controversial response, but I would only really bother with notes for some of the crime section and the human rights section. My reasons are as follows:
- for crime and human rights, because they are tested short answer and multiple choice, its important you have a concrete grasp of the topics so that you can explicitly know the detail in answering questions and know which dot point that the question is alluding to. I have a full set of HR notes because they're short answer questions and thus 1) there is no time to waffle and 2) the markers are looking at your understanding of the content and you need to be sharp and explicit in your content. While I obviously don't want these to be overly dense, I want enough so that i can write as much as the exam desires. I would try be light in crime notes too to provide flexibility for the essay, something I will allude to with the options.
Whereas in the options, because they are tested in an essay form, it is more important that you know how to apply relevant information to a set question, rather then rote learning a bunch of content. What I would do is look at the past questions for your options, notice trends in questions and what is frequently asked and really hammer those aspects of the course. Obviously, definitions and stuff you need to know explicitly however the essays are testing your ability to link things you know to a given question and provide your own voice in it. This is why, for example with me for my last World Order task, the first part of the syllabus doesn't really give any essay questions and is just a basic overview of the concept. As long as I sorta get what's going on there, then I'm sweet. Then I got together a range of LCMD that could be flexible and be used in a range of questions, and as a lot of questions revolve around legal/non-legal measures, I would integrate the relevant evidence and write very brief notes on the mechanism just explaining what it is to ensure that the marker can see that I know the content. In short, it basically relies on you having an actual understanding of the topic, rather then just a memorisation of dot points. Not only will this save a stack of time because you will avoid writing notes on content you just don't really need, it reduces the likelihood that you will write out a pre-prepared response and annoy the marker that you didn't answer the question. In a topic like world order it is particularly important (I think) to learn the content in this way because all of the concepts revolve around each other. I'm not saying memorisation is a bad thing necessarily because the fact of the matter is you need to memorise LCMD and aspects of the theory to get a good mark, but learning all the content in a linear format is not the way to go.
I guess in terms of study - just find what works best for you. Not writing syllabus dot points and rote learning for the options, though, is the way to go i feel