I think learning HOW to study is definitely the biggest thing. Quality over Quantity is very important. Of course that's different for everyone too. In undergrad the first time it was mostly read or skim the chapter, then review notes. In problem solving classes it was working problems. If I had trouble it was more reading, just putting in more time. That wasn't necessarily a bad strategy for me, but I'm a very visual and active type learner and just adding more hours wasn't giving me a good return. I didn't have the best attention span either. I tended to zone out reading and what I'd read two paragraphs ago would go buh-bye pretty quick.
In undergrad the next time I went and talked to someone about study habits. She was a bit perplexed since I was getting good grades, but I wanted to be more efficient.
So I made a really minor change in how I took notes, not so much what I took down as I think I tend to take pretty good notes. Just how I organized my notebook layout. Then I tried to make my reading more active either drawing diagrams or taking summary notes, just so I stayed on task. I also took more frequent breaks.
For the problem based courses, it's still doing problems. The cool thing now, though, is that if I get stuck and don't understand something I can usually go pull up a resource on the web that explains it in a different way that makes sense to me and if I run out of problems before I feel comfortable, I can usually find more somewhere.
For courses like medical micro where I had to memorize 200 some odd organisms, diagnostic tests for each of them, symptoms, and diseases they cause I drew classification trees to break things into groups that made sense so I could visualize everything, keep it organized, and just kept doing over it again and again until I could draw it in my sleep.
Another big thing that keeps things efficient is that you might be able to get away with memorizing a bunch of facts, but the more you understand conceptually, the less you need to memorize so it becomes more efficient usually to understand stuff. I took several classes, one especially, where my classmates where taking at least twice as many notes as I was. They were so busy trying to scrawl down every detail the instructor said that they missed the big picture. I had half as many notes, but was able to sit with my pencil still while getting the main point and writing that down, with a few brief details to trigger my memory of whatever story he used to illustrate the point. It's a hard balance to strike, but a very important one to figure out.
Back to micro, my study partner was struggling to try to memorize each individual organism and the facts about each one. I suggested she memorize things about them in groups, and also instead of trying to remember that organisms a,b,c,d,and e are oxidase positive and f was negative, that maybe she should just focus on the exceptions. So just remember that f was negative, but the rest of the group was usually positive. She did a lot better after that.
I've found studying with people, and teaching/quizzing each other also works really well for me, provided we can a.) stay on topic b.) it's with people you work well with that take the task seriously and c.) strawberries and fruit dip are involved (ultimate brain snack I swear
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The last thing was my summary sheets. When I would review I would note the key points that I absolutely knew I'd be tested on, took really brief notes on things I was comfortable with, then more detailed explanations of things I needed more time with. Then I'd go through that, review and explain things to myself or draw out diagrams for the topics to see what I knew about it. After that I'd and pare it down again, leaving just the blatantly obvious test topics and stuff I was struggling with. I'd just keep working with that, reviewing and paring it down.
You gotta be able to narrow your focus!
