My mouth actually dropped open reading that first line. When I was at university around the year 2000, it was the way the majority of us made our lecture notes. (Another advantage: it makes it easy for someone to unclip a few pages to lend to you when you missed a lecture.)
That's wild to me. Maybe it's a UK or European thing, judging from the way you say "at university"?
In the US, at least everywhere I went to school, the loose three-hole pages were strictly for homework, so you could hand it in and then put it in your binder once you got it back.
Notes were almost always in spiral-bound notebooks so you could flip the left side underneath, so it wouldn't take up as much space and it could angle it well for writing. A few people would use glue-bound notebooks that couldn't, but those were usually much smaller for that reason (and often more expensive).
Would you take each sheet out of the binder before writing? It seems like that would be the only way to do it, otherwise it slides around too much?
At school/college in the 90s, ring binders [1] were mandated by most subjects. Schools had piles of loose-leaf pre-punched A4 paper, but encouraged everyone to buy their own, which meant buying loosely-glued pads [2]. And dividers [3] helped to split your topics, subjects or university modules in the same ring binder.
Working in retail 1998-2004 (I've taken no notice of how much things may have changed since), the ring binders and paper pads were piled high and sold in huge numbers at "back to school" times. Full pallets of the paper in the window displays at Woolworths.
> Would you take each sheet out of the binder before writing?
If using the cheap crap paper sold by many shops, that could only feasibly be written one side, then yes I did, I'm left-handed so the rings were in the way! Right-handers generally didn't. I suppose the answer is "sometimes". I don't think it slides around. I find the same problem with a spiral binding - too difficult to write at the left edge, and no option there to move the paper away. A weird problem that at least we don't get with tablets.
You also mentioned earlier:
> the holes rip easily on thin note paper
Yep, tell me about it [4].
Also, an open ring-binder is wide. In school you'd sometimes have to tuck the end under that of the person sitting next to you.
But as cesarb said a few posts ago, they "allow one to easily re-order pages, and group them by subject." All options have their pros and cons, we just attach different weights to them.
