Memory. Taking notes?

[Vanzazikon]

I usually don't take notes too. During a lecture, I can remember and understand what the professor is teaching; however, certain factors distract me from listening, such as boredom, procrastination or stress. Usually during final weeks, I tend to forget a lot what professors had taught during a session. I do remember trying to listen, but I was under a lot of stress during those times. During a lecture, I try to interpret what the professor is saying, then as I think about upcoming tests, I zone out. I start thinking about the other classes; "what kind of materials are going to covered on the final test, is my grade high enough that when I fail the test or get a "D", I'll still be able to pass, did I study enough?"

It's not only the finals week, when one of my grades in a class plummets, I start focusing on that one class, as I only think of that one class, I'd forget what was being taught in another. If the class is relaxing, you have a good grip of whats going on and you participate often in that class, you would remember a lot.

[Kylie]

My memory is weird. I remember the most random things, and I always remember stuff pretty well from lectures and lessons. In fact, I didn't take notes at all during high school because I would be fine as long as I was there and heard the discussion. See, I learn things best by talking them out and letting them sink in. Of course, some teachers were assholes and did notebook checks, so I had to write some things down.

I think everyone just learns best in different ways, different capacities, etc.

[Rust]

I'm a bit like Kylie on this.
I can remember a lot of random and unsignificant stuff, and some other are just going away for no reason.
I tend to remember way more easily anything that has been said, done or anything being the result of some kind of activity ; when I read stuff, I don't forget as soon as I read it, but I only recall of the overall idea, not of any specific sentence or such. Just as an example, I couldn't recall a single sentence of your post (so not the first either) without looking it up again, but I remember about the main points, including the "College Success" class, how people in your class are botting on WoW instead of working and how you don't blame your C++ teacher for having half of his class failing miserably at it.

On the other, I'm distracted a lot. Like thinking about having to do something, then something happens on the spot which makes me putting it aside for the very moment, then when I'm done with the former task, I completely forgot about what I wanted to do first (not in the sense that I can't recall it, but really that I don't think about it anymore at all). And several hours later, I'm all like "Damn crap, I forgot it again".

As for the lessons and classes specific domain, well, first I didn't have any choice but taking notes at high school ; you weren't considered a "good" student if you were slacking in class.
In university, though, it highly depends of the type of information and on the situation.

Anything that was specifically referred as something you had to know by heart, I was for sure noting it. Most of the classes I had were theoric stuff, classes being only 3 hours a week, with only one exam per class, at the end of the semester. I'd have forgotten such things as dates or any other numerical stuff pretty easily in about five months.
Now, if the theory was more about some kind of concepts you just had to get, especially if I was interested into it, no need to note anything about it, once the class was done, I had integrated it. Same goes with anything requiring activities ; manipulating lightings, video editing programs and such are easy to keep in mind once you got to practice it a bit.
I though had to take some classes I wasn't interested in, and thus had short attention span, so I was taking notes of anything I could grab from the class 'cause I knew it would have completely faded away as soon as I would have left the room.

In other notes, people who can't seem to recall a thing are bothering me to no end, especially when they don't even seem to make an effort towards that issue.
I have one of my tabletop RPG players who can't seem to retain a single simple thing about the game. Well, yeah, indeed I can recall most things better than he did since I'm the one who made up the plot and all the custom rules, and I can get he would recall every detail of the story when we're doing a session once every two months during a whole 24 hours, everyone's exhausted in the end and stuff ; but the guy has been playing the damn game for about 3 years now, and he's still at the point of asking which die to throw for a skill check every time he does such a check and asks me the same three f*ckin' questions every time he levels up.
That's getting irritating, it's like I take the effort of explaining something he asked me to explain for almost an hour, he nods to it like he got everything, which he actually did on the spot, but that's all. Your efforts are wasted within the next hour.