Some students take notes with paper and pencil, trying to match the pace of the instructor as they deliver a lecture. Other students, taking notes on laptops, have the speed of keyboard typing and the help of spell check, but also the distractions that come with easy access to the internet. They might rattle off a quick email or buy that pair of shoes they have wanted for a while. For good measure, they play some 2048.
Are the assets and drawbacks of laptops as a note-taking tool in class beneficial or detrimental overall?
For some, using a laptop is necessary — students with dyslexia, ADHD or other learning disorders sometimes require a screen. Henry Gooding ’24 uses a laptop to take notes in all his classes. Gooding said, “I have dyslexia, and I have an accommodation — a laptop is significantly better for my note taking. For me, it helps a lot.” When Gooding tries to take notes on paper, they frequently misspell words and have no spellcheck to catch their errors. Going back to erase or cross out these mistakes leaves them behind in any given lecture. “The general act of writing on paper is significantly harder,” Gooding said.
Gooding also makes the point that distraction is sometimes an inherent part of class, whether there are screens or not. He said, “I don’t know if my mind is fully there regardless of what mode of note taking.” Gooding added, “even if there’s no notes, if I’m just sitting and listening, I think there’s a good chance I’m thinking of something else anyway, because that’s just how my brain works.” Still, a laptop can add more potential sources of distraction to the already-existing pile. Gooding continued, “I do think the laptop, though, provides opportunities to do other things that are completely not paying attention to the notes, more so than with paper.”
Even when Gooding is interested in a class, they find their mind searching for more stimulation, whether they want it to or not. “I don’t typically do things that really draw my mind away,” Gooding said. “I never feel like I’m fully out of focus in a class [while on a laptop]. If anything, it helps me more to give me an outlet to do something else with my hands. I’m moving my fingers playing 2048.”
Games like 2048, a simple game where players slide blocks numbered with powers of two around a four-by-four grid, as well as The New York Times games, are all common distractions. Other students admitted to playing chess, online shopping and texting friends.
Although Gooding acknowledged that some games can be a helpful outlet while listening in class, he also recognizes that laptop use can be distracting. He said, “I’ve seen people texting, shopping, playing games. I feel like that distracts me more than me doing stuff. But then I’ll feel bad because I know other people can see my screen, so I know I’m distracting them.”
Isa Cardoso ’25 agrees that screens are distracting in class, and therefore chooses to write by hand. They said, “Screens are super distracting for me, particularly if I’m sitting behind someone. It’s a big reason I try to sit toward the front of classes. My own screens are especially distracting. I’ll text, email, review my calendar, check BlackBoard, play 2048, and do basically any menial work that could distract me.”
Elizabeth Gee ’24 also mentioned this phenomenon: “I know a lot of people who have attention issues, or ADHD, where they have to sit in the front of the class, because if they see anyone else’s laptops, they get completely distracted.”
Professors have their own dilemma — they look up and are sometimes greeted by a wall of laptops. Are the students paying attention?
Last summer, Gooding worked a job teaching high schoolers and ran into some of the same issues. “They would have their AirPods in and do things way worse than being on your laptop,” Gooding said. “And as a teacher, sometimes I was like, that kind of sucks. But at the same time, I can’t control them. They’re taking out of this class what they’re putting in.”
Gooding recognizes that professors cannot fix everything. “My perspective is, if someone’s [going to entirely zone out during class], they’re not here for the right reasons, or they’re having a really bad day, and just can’t be in class that day. That’s valid, but I don’t know if it’s the professor’s job to fix that. They do their job as a professor, and there’s nothing more they can do.”
Most professors are also forced to adapt to a generational divide. Their students have grown up with screens in a way current professors did not. Prior to laptops existing, Benjamin Widiss, professor of literature, took all his notes by hand when he was in school. Now that he is on the other side of the lecture, it is a different world. “I can feel how my own attention span has atrophied,” Widiss said. “The little tugs of the screen, saying ‘dopamine, dopamine.’”
“I have tried different things,” Widiss said of his laptop policy in class. “I think it’s very hard to have a laptop open and not think about the other things that laptop makes available. I think it’s hard to be next to an open laptop, or 45 degrees behind an open laptop, and not be distracted by what’s on the screen there.”
Widiss has heard from auditors in other classes what various students do on laptops. He said, “I’ve heard from people in the back rows that people are texting, shopping, sometimes looking up ancillary information, which is more defensible. But there are a lot of distractions that laptops bring into the space.”
He can typically tell if a student on their laptop is engaged in class. “It is actually possible for us, as faculty members, to see the way people’s eyes and hands are moving, and to recognize that it is almost certainly not just taking notes on what is going on in the classroom.”
Widiss only holds class entirely without laptops when he knows, thanks to Assistant Dean for Accessibility Resources Allen Harrison’s office, that nobody has an accommodation. Sometimes he arranges a system (courtesy of his sister, who is a law school professor) in which one student takes notes for the group, then distributes and shares them with the rest of the class.
Even that system has complications. “Different people take notes in different ways,” Widiss said. “You have to figure out, is this going to be a requirement that has some bearing on people’s grades, or is it purely extra, and what happens when people take it with different degrees of seriousness? Is it my job to look at the notes and make corrections for things that were inaccurately represented, or do I trust students to police that for each other?” Widiss once had two people, separately, take notes for the whole class, then let the students compare the different accounts of the session.
Widiss said, “I don’t have a solution that I’m entirely happy with, or that has worked every semester.” He continued, “I have more often not made a blanket policy, but articulated my reservations about laptops, and then allowed students to make their own choices, and if necessary, spoken with people who seem to be making bad choices.”
However, that is not a perfect fix for Widiss either. “I don’t always have the stomach for having those conversations repeatedly,” Widiss admitted. He tries to withhold skepticism immediately, entering classes with trust and an open mind, but sometimes a pattern emerges from a student that makes the conversation inevitable.
Nate Wild ’24 recalled experiences in high school in which students had Chromebooks. Through a software company called GoGuardian, teachers could go into students’ laptops and close unrelated tabs. He thinks a similar policy would not work in college. “You’re older,” Wild said. “The professor is putting trust in you that you’re going to be doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and putting all your attention into this class. It’s not something that they go around and be, like, ‘oh, why don’t you go ahead and log out for me.’”
Gee concurred. “I don’t think, in college, professors need to be policing that…I guess there is an attendance requirement, but they’re not [going to] call your parents if you don’t show up to class. Part of the difference between college and high school is that [college] is self-motivated and you’re choosing to be here.”
Students have had different experiences with laptop restrictions or lack thereof in their classes. Wild mentioned professors who allowed laptops with the stipulation that they be used for work. Gee had a professor last semester who wrote in the syllabus not to use laptops, but did not mention the policy in class. “I’ve had professors that threaten that, but I think they don’t want to be [like] high school teachers, they don’t want to be narcs, so [they say] it’s your decision. If you’re not paying attention, it’s your fault, essentially.”
During big sporting events or breaking news, laptops get some extra use. “During the World Cup,” Gee remembered, “I would look up, and every single laptop had soccer showing.”
Yuxuan Xu ’26 has a professor who has a no-laptop policy. They have posted a paper explaining why, to which students can respond to make their case if they want to use a laptop in class. He has another class, this one lecture-based, and says most students in the class are on their laptops. “[The professor] gives warnings, like ‘this will affect your participation grade’ every week, but then I don’t think anybody actually does anything about it. [It is] definitely not the best learning environment. I find it a little hard to blame students in that specific class for understandable use of laptops.”
Xu makes the point that tablets could be a better alternative, providing some of the same benefits as laptops while lying flat on a desk, potentially reducing other activities for fear of the professor seeing.
“I do feel like it’s an unrealistic expectation that everyone’s coming into class perfectly ready, not thinking about [other] things, because we have so many things going on in our lives,” Gooding said. “It’s hard to remove all that when you walk into the classroom. I don’t think anyone can. Professors can’t, either.”
Alexandra Plakias, professor of philosophy, tries. Recognizing her own tendency to get distracted — “if I’m in meetings, and I have a laptop open in front of me, it’s almost a reflex to check other tabs. There’s something about the presence of a laptop that conditions us to multitask.” For this reason, Plakias said she asks her students not to use laptops.
“I worry that my students think I don’t let them use laptops because I think they’re somehow untrustworthy or something. That’s not it at all: I just think none of us is really great at resisting the temptation posed by laptops and the internet being right there in front of us. And even if we do resist it, that takes a kind of mental energy that we might better direct towards thinking and working.”
Even if the laptops were used exclusively for note-taking, Plakias thinks they draw students’ attention away from the flow of a class. To discourage the frantic recording of all the information said during class, Plakias prints and distributes handouts so that her students can follow along and participate in discussion without scrambling to write or type everything out.
Some students use their laptops in class to stay on top of emails and other homework. Plakais said, “We’re conditioned and more and more we’re encouraged to feel like we should always be maximizing our productivity.” She empathized with students’ tendency to use their laptops for non-class related activities.
She said, “I don’t blame students for thinking that they might check their email or work on something else for a bit — and I bet you many faculty would also relate to that impulse. But we are here to encourage students to think, and sometimes that means letting yourself get a little bored, or letting your mind wander.”
Plakias also builds group discussions into her classes to break up a 75-minute period. “If students are giving me or my class their attention for 75 minutes, I do try to bring some energy to that and make it worth their while,” she explained. “I realize that’s an effort for them, and I try to respect that and acknowledge it.”
Naomi Guttman, professor of literature and creative writing, acknowledges that laptops have many benefits: saving paper and commenting on virtual documents among them. However, she thinks their distracting abilities often overrule the benefits, noting that a laptop doesn’t just distract the user, but the user’s neighbor and even the professor. “It’s distracting to have a distracted person in your class!” she said.
Both students and professors struggle to find a perfect solution. There is no one-size-fits-all policy. One class might be discussion-based, with no need for laptops, while a lecture-based course could almost require the use of a laptop to keep up. Students and professors are unique — some work well with technology. Others do not. The introduction of laptops has complicated the issue to the point that no school of thought can be without compromise. Even letting everyone do what best suits them could negatively impact those who do not want to use laptops, since they would remain distracted by the blinking screens in front of them.
“I feel like either extreme, now, is probably detrimental to learning in some way,” Wild said. “Because we’re so heavily reliant on technology now, and there’s so many things that can be done on laptops. Taking all the technology out of it would be detrimental to the setting, but there needs to be a balance.” As with most issues with two extremes, the best answer to laptops or no laptops is likely somewhere in the middle.
Cardoso put it most succinctly in the end. “I think technology is a prison, so I hate having my own laptop in class.” They added, though, that “Other people should do what their hearts desire.”
