IT CAN'T BE EFFICIENT IF IT'S NOT EFFECTIVE.

Northern Star columnist Ally Formeller correctly recognizes that "Laptop notes keep students from learning."  The key, and it is important for students to recognize it, is that playacting at court transcriptionist isn't the same thing as engaging the material.

Note taking sucks; it’s slow, tedious and easy to miss exactly what the professor said.  Taking the time to write your notes by hand, though, is actually how you learn— not with a blank page of Google Docs in front of you.

With laptops being nearly ubiquitous in 2021, most students can probably type faster than they can write. Taking notes on a laptop is faster, arguably more efficient and it’s easier to carry around a laptop than multiple notebooks.

It's not more efficient if all you're doing is keying stuff in, and if you're trying to write everything down, you can fall for a sucker play in the fashion of "After the battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon understood he could not occupy Britain, so he dropped an atomic bomb on London and invaded Russia." I've heard of this gambit being used, with nobody raising a hand for a "Could you repeat that?"

It's never been the case that jotting down every word or every thought is the key to grasping the material, which the professor ought not be rushing through just to get through it, in any event.

Maybe laptops are more entertaining, but in terms of actually taking good notes, handwritten ones are at least less distracting.

Even when students are paying attention and typing notes, the results are simply not as good as when students hand‑write their notes.

According to a study published in Psychological Science, “present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing.”

This is because, by using laptops, students can quickly type what the professor says verbatim. But that isn’t as useful as it may seem.

By copying exactly what the professor says, students don’t actually have to think about or sort through any information.

It might be that twelve years of experience with being taught to the test in the common schools gets collegians in the habit of wanting to get everything down, as who knows what sort of obscure stuff will make it onto a multiple choice test (that's a different sort of false productivity, but you knew that, dear reader!)  Note though, that being able to transcribe in a hurry becomes a false efficiency!

Furthermore, I don't know if there is a fact-checking algorithm a student can log into so that when "Napoleon atomic bomb London invade Russia" shows up, the transcription gets flagged.  I do know that social media and all sorts of online convenience is a tab away.

Students aren’t exactly known for having long attention spans. In fact, some psychologists believe that the attention span of a student is only about 10 to 15 minutes long. While this claim is unsupported, it’s true that some students will inevitably get bored in class.

And with a laptop in front of them, they aren’t just limited to daydreaming or doodling in their notebooks. Instead, they can shop, message friends, watch videos and even do assignments for other classes.

It's possible that professors are not bothered by such zoning out, as the nonaggression pact, which is neither efficient nor cost effective, might include using that morning class for ordering lunch, or that afternoon class for setting up the evening's activity.  None of that serves the students well.

According to a study published in the Media Education Research Journal, “listening to a lecture requires a phonological processing, but writing the ideas heard also requires their «translation» into orthographic processing, which can facilitate information recall.”

The same study suggests that handwritten notes can stimulate more stable synapses, which means students will be able to remember what’s in their notes for longer.

As technology is increasingly available, students will continue to use and adapt it to their needs. In this case, however, the cons outweigh the pros— laptops are distracting, loud and not actually all that great for taking notes.

To an extent, it's also on the professors to keep the students engaged, by calling for questions or by otherwise encouraging those parallel processes of information.