A 5 mm grid that measures 5 mm
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Notes & writing
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Planning
— mm
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Prints a measured strip. If a ruler disagrees with it, your printer is scaling the page.
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1:1 detail · 62 × 40 mm
Drawn in real millimeters. Hold a ruler to the screen — if it disagrees, your display's reported DPI is wrong, not the PDF.
Printable Cornell notes template, to exact spec
The Cornell notes layout is three regions: a narrow cue column down the left, the main notes area beside it, and a summary strip across the bottom.
The ruling isn't the method, though. The method is that you leave the cue column and the summary empty during the lecture and fill them in afterwards, from memory where you can. Notes written straight into a Cornell sheet and never revisited are just notes with a wasted margin.
Rule spacing here sets the gap in the notes area; 7mm suits most handwriting. The cue column comes in three widths, with standard working out around 60mm on a Letter page.
The method, not the layout
Walter Pauk described the method in How to Study in College in 1962. The page division is the part everyone copies.
The sequence is: record notes in the main column during the lecture, reduce them afterwards to cues and questions in the left column, recite by covering the notes and answering the cues from memory, reflect on how the material connects to what you know, and review over the following weeks.
Four of those five happen after the lecture. The cue column and summary strip are meant to be filled in later. Filled in during the lecture, they are just a narrower page.
Sizing the regions
Pauk's original was sized for US Letter, with a cue column around 2.5 inches and a summary strip a couple of inches deep.
Those measurements do not transfer to other page sizes. 2.5 inches out of an A5 sheet is nearly half its width. The regions here are ratios of the printable area, set to reproduce the Letter layout at Letter size. Standard cue width comes out around 60mm on Letter.
Narrow leaves more room for notes. Wide suits material where the cue is a full question rather than a single term.
Rule spacing in the notes area is separate. 7mm is the default, 6mm if you write small, 8mm and up if you don't.
Where it does not fit
Cornell is built for linear verbal material at speaking pace: lectures, readings, meetings.
Mathematics is a poor fit. A derivation does not reduce to cue-and-answer pairs, and a narrow column is the wrong shape to work in. Diagram-heavy subjects have the same problem.
Short material does not need the overhead either.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Cornell method?
Cue column on the left, notes on the right, summary across the bottom. You fill in the cue column and summary after the lecture — that's the part that does the work.
What rule spacing?
6–8mm suits most handwriting. The default is 7mm.
Can I change the cue column width?
Yes — narrow, standard or wide.