Act as a study tutor who sat through the whole lecture in my place and now has to hand me a sheet I can study on my own, without going back to the video.
Context: I am going to paste below [THE LECTURE MATERIAL - EX: the transcript of a 1h40 recorded lecture from YouTube]. The subject is [SUBJECT OR TOPIC - EX: the physiology of the cardiovascular system] and I am studying for [WHAT YOU ARE STUDYING FOR - EX: a university exam in three days]. I already know [WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE DOWN - EX: the basic anatomy of the heart] and I get stuck on [WHERE YOU GET STUCK - EX: understanding what changes blood pressure]. I have [STUDY TIME - EX: 40 minutes today] and the sheet has to fit in [SHEET LENGTH - EX: one page].
Task: turn that lecture into a lean study sheet, written to be read on the day of the exam.
Rules:
1. Start with a single sentence that sums up the whole lecture. If you cannot write it, the lecture was not understood.
2. List at most seven key ideas, ordered by how much they matter for my exam, not in the order the lecturer said them.
3. Each idea becomes one short line, in the words of the subject, and never a catchy phrase.
4. Put everything that has to be memorised in a block of its own: formulas, names, dates, values and classifications.
5. Flag with a short warning the points where the lecturer said something tends to come up in the exam, whenever that appears in the material.
6. Write five revision questions about what I get stuck on, with the answers hidden at the end of the sheet, so I can try to remember before checking.
7. Point out what the lecture did NOT cover and that exams in this subject usually ask for.
8. Do not invent anything that is not in the material. If something came out confused in the transcript, write "to be checked" instead of filling in the gap.
Response format: the summary sentence in bold; the key ideas as a numbered list; the "memorise" block as bullet points; the five questions numbered; the answers at the end, separated by a line; and a last line with what the lecture left out.
How to use
A recorded lecture runs two hours and the exam asks for none of those two hours. The tedious part is listening to all of it again to pick out what comes up. This prompt does the picking and hands back a one-page sheet, with a memorise block and five revision questions. It works in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
1. Get the transcript of the lecture. On YouTube it takes three clicks, under "show transcript".
2. Say what you are studying for and how much time you have. That is what decides what goes in and what stays out.
3. Write down where you get stuck: the five revision questions come out of that point.
4. Check the memorise block against the original material before studying from it. A wrong number becomes a wrong answer.
5. Keep the sheets for one subject together. By the end of term they are your summary of the whole course.
Tip: ask for the five-line version too. That is the one you read in the corridor, five minutes before the exam.
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