Why Your Summaries Aren't Working (And What to Do Instead)

You've done the same thing your whole time in college: read the chapter, highlight what matters, then rewrite it in your own words in a separate document. A summary. What you were taught to do since high school.

The problem is you get to the exam and can't remember half of it. And it's not because you didn't put in the work — you spent hours making that summary. It's that summarizing, the way you're doing it, isn't studying. It's transcribing.

A summary makes you feel like you're studying, but it doesn't force you to recall anything

When you summarize, you're reading the material and rewriting it in shorter form. That's an exercise in comprehension and synthesis, and it has value. But at no point do you close the source and try to pull the information back out of your head without looking at it.

That's exactly what your brain needs to lock something into long-term memory: the effort of retrieving information on its own. It's called active recall, and it's the single best predictor of whether something sticks or not.

Summarizing looks a lot like active recall, but it isn't. You have the original in front of you the whole time. There's never a moment where your brain has to go find the answer by itself.

Why "in your own words" isn't enough

There's a widespread idea: if you write it in your own words, you understand it, and if you understand it, you'll remember it. That's partly true, but incomplete.

Understanding a concept and being able to recall it three weeks later, under pressure, in an exam, are two different skills. You can perfectly understand the difference between two legal concepts while you're writing about them, and still blank out on the exam because you never practiced retrieving that information without the material in front of you.

Summarizing trains comprehension. The exam demands recall. They're different exercises, and you're only training one of the two.

The other problem: how much time summarizing eats up

Even if summarizing worked as well as self-testing (it doesn't), there's a second problem: cost. Summarizing 40 pages can take you two or three hours. And that time wasn't spent learning the content — it was spent rephrasing it.

That's time you could have spent quizzing yourself on the material and finding out what you actually know versus what you don't. Which, on top of that, is much faster to repeat the next day, and the day after.

What to do instead of summarizing (or alongside it)

You don't have to stop summarizing entirely — for some people it helps to organize ideas the first time they see a topic. But it can't be your only study tool. You need to add something that forces you to retrieve information without looking at your notes.

1. Test yourself after reading, not the night before the exam. As soon as you finish a chapter, quiz yourself on it without looking at the material. Whatever you get wrong is exactly what you need to review.
2. Space your repetitions instead of cramming the day before. Reviewing the same material five times in a row the night before an exam is far less effective than reviewing it three times spread over several days.
3. Prioritize what you get wrong, not what you already know. Most students review the entire syllabus equally. Your time pays off more when you concentrate it on your weak spots.
4. Use the summary as a first step, not the final one. If it helps you organize ideas, go ahead, but then turn it into questions and test yourself with them.

Where technology fits in

The reason almost nobody does self-testing consistently is simple: it's a hassle to generate the questions. You have to reread the material, figure out what to ask, write it down, and organize it. Summarizing is faster, even though it works worse.

ExamFlow solves exactly that bottleneck. Upload your notes or the chapter PDF and in a couple of minutes you get a practice exam generated from that specific content. You take it, see what you got wrong, and the system lets you retake it focused only on those mistakes.

It doesn't replace understanding the material. But it does replace the part of your current method that performs worst: spending hours transcribing notes you won't remember on exam day.

The question to ask yourself

Next time you open a chapter to "make the summary," ask yourself: is this going to force me to remember something, or just rewrite it? If the answer is the second one, you're not studying badly — you're just using the wrong tool for what you actually need.

Try it with the next chapter you have pending: instead of summarizing it, generate a practice exam from it and test yourself. The difference shows up in your next review session, not the first one.

Read also

• How to Summarize Notes and PDFs with AI (And Actually Use Them to Study)
• How to Study Faster in College
• Turn a Textbook PDF Into Practice Exams
• Flashcards and Spaced Repetition: The Science