Glenn's Suggestions for Studying

Axiom #1: Studying well for exams is not for wimps.

Even more true than for everything else, education is all about hard work.  The more you put in, the more you get out.  99% perspiration.  Elbow grease.  Last I checked, there's still no substitute for hard work.  You get the picture.

Thus, my main advice regarding studying is simply study a lot and work very hard at it.  However, given my proclivity toward specifics, I figure it may be useful to put a face to the kind of hard work I'm talking about with regard to studying.  My specific suggestions, delineated below, generally follow a 'study by writing' philosophy.

Take a (very literally) active approach to reading/studying.  The best way to 'act,' from my perspective, is to write -- the more you write out content from a text, the more you force yourself to place a meaningful structure onto the material .  Toward that end, when studying material for an exam, I suggest that you ...

1.  Highlight or underline information that is new to you (that you did not know prior to reading the particular material).
2.  Re-read the chapter afterward while concurrently writing out (summarizing) that highlighted material in a notebook.  For a typical college textbook chapter, I would suggest creating approximately 10 pages of notes.
3.  Review those notes over and over until you are certain that you have mastered them.
4.  Along the way, highlight or underline information from the notes you have taken -- then review that (very much extrapolated) information.
5.  With this system, you can't lose.  You'll know the information as well as the textbook author.