Scribba
Every week of a semester brings new lectures, new readings and at least one deadline you'd forgotten about. Without a regular pause to look at all of it, you mostly react to whatever is due tomorrow. A weekly review is that pause: one block of 30 to 60 minutes, at the same time each week, to close out the week behind you and set up the one ahead.
It's different from the short review you do after each lecture. That one repairs a single page of notes while it's fresh; see how to review your notes after class. The weekly review zooms out across all your classes at once. And if all you need is a quick planner update, the 15-minute check in how to set up an iPad planner for the school year covers that. This is the fuller version.
Pick a time and protect it
Choose a slot you can keep almost every week. Sunday afternoon or evening is a common choice because it leads straight into Monday. Friday afternoon works if you like starting the weekend with a clear head. Put it in your planner like a class.
Go somewhere you can spread out, and bring everything: your notes, your planner, your course pages, and the papers that piled up in your bag.
The routine
The steps below take about 30 minutes in a light week and closer to an hour in a busy one. Do them in order.
1. Clear the loose ends (5 to 10 minutes)
Collect everything that arrived this week but didn't land anywhere: handouts, sticky notes, photos of the whiteboard, course announcements, emails from professors. For each one, decide where it goes. A handout goes in the class notebook. A new deadline goes in the planner. A task goes on your to-do list. Throw out what you don't need.
The goal is that nothing important lives only in your inbox or the bottom of your bag.
2. Review each class (15 to 25 minutes)
Go class by class. For each one:
- Read this week's lecture summaries in order. You'll see how the ideas connect, which is hard to notice one lecture at a time.
- Quiz yourself. Pick a few key ideas and explain them without looking, or answer the questions in your margins. This is active recall, and it tells you far more than rereading.
- List what you still don't get. Confusing points go on a short list for office hours, a study group or a classmate.
- Check for holes. If a lecture's notes are thin, or you missed a class, decide when you'll fix it.
Give the most time to the class that's hardest or has the next exam. A class that's going well might need only five minutes.
3. Clear your flashcards (5 to 10 minutes)
If you use spaced repetition, review the cards that are due. If you made new cards from this week's notes, look them over and fix any that are vague or too long. Spaced repetition flashcards explains how the schedule works.
4. Look ahead (5 to 10 minutes)
Open your planner and look at the next two or three weeks, not just the next one.
- What's due next week?
- What exams or big assignments land in the two weeks after that?
- Did any deadline change this week? Update it now.
- For each big item, what's the next step, and when will you do it?
5. Plan next week (5 to 10 minutes)
Now decide what next week looks like:
- Pick your top three priorities, the things that would make it a good week if they got done.
- Give each one a study block on a specific day and time. If you have a study schedule, adjust your weekly template to what's actually due.
- Schedule your office hours visit for the questions from step 2.
- Leave some open time. Something will run over.
6. Close out (2 minutes)
Write one line about how the week went: what worked and what didn't. Over a semester, these lines show you patterns, like the day you never study or the class that keeps sneaking up on you. Then stop. The week is planned, and the rest of the day is yours.
Tip: if you're short on time, do steps 4 and 5. Looking ahead and planning the week is the part that prevents surprises.
Keep it from turning into a study session
The weekly review is for taking stock and planning, not for learning a whole unit. If you find yourself spending 40 minutes on one chapter, write "review chapter 7" into a study block next week and move on. A review that stays short is a review you'll keep doing.
Doing your weekly review in Scribba
Scribba is an iPad notes app for class, and most of this routine can happen inside it.
Tabs for the whole review. Open your planner and each class notebook as tabs. Scribba keeps up to six notebooks open, and ⌘⇧[ and ⌘⇧] move between them on a keyboard, so you can work through your classes in order.
Find this week's lectures fast. If you use Start Lecture, each class session has a dated, bookmarked page, so the notebook's table of contents lists every lecture. Jump straight to this week's.
A Study Guide for each class. On iPads that support Apple Intelligence, with it turned on, Study Guide puts the key points of every lecture in a notebook on one sheet, split at each Start Lecture page. It's a quick way to see this week in the context of the whole course. You can add it to the notebook as pages or turn it into flashcards. See Study Guide from lecture notes.
All due flashcards at once. Scribba's flashcards come back after 1, 3, 7, 14 and 30 days, and you can study every due card across your decks in one session. Vocabulary and Cornell Notes pages turn into flashcards on any iPad: Scribba reads your handwriting and makes a card from each row or cue.
Quiz with study tape. Drag study tape over terms and diagram labels, then tap to peek. It's a fast way to test yourself on a page without making cards.
Loose ends into the right place. Scan paper handouts with the camera so they end up in the right class notebook. To-Do List paper holds the tasks from step 1, and a dated planner, with a month calendar plus weekly spreads, handles the look-ahead.
Search for what you half remember. Scribba searches handwriting, typed text, PDF text and lecture transcripts from the library. If you remember a deadline being mentioned but not where, search for it.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a weekly review take?
Around 30 minutes in a light week and up to an hour in a busy one. If it regularly runs longer, you're probably studying during it; move that work into your regular study blocks.
How is this different from reviewing notes after class?
The after-class review is short and covers one lecture while it's fresh. The weekly review covers all your classes, connects the week's lectures and plans the week ahead.
What if I skip a week?
Just do the next one. Start with the look-ahead and planning steps, since they matter most, and catch up on the class reviews as you can.