My main technique from my engineering undergrad days was extremely effective and yet very simple and easy to describe and/or implement. It is:
1. Attend the lectures and take good notes. Don't write things down that are obvious or that you already know.
2. Before any exam, go back over the dozens of pages of notes and condense them down to 3 or 4 pages, omitting details that will be brought to mind by the things you are writing down.
3. Go back over the 3 to 4 pages, condensing them down to a single page, compactly written.
4. Go back over the single page, condensing it down to a single notecard.
The act of condensing requires you to internalize the knowledge enough to know what you have memorized and what you must still note down. And the act of repeatedly writing down the hard parts commits those to memory too.
By the end, the notecard has a handful of difficult to remember formulas and a bunch of keywords that prompt your memory to recall the salient details. In the US at that time, a single notecard was often allowed during exams, so the final work product was also that card.
(My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.)
That's interesting, in a similar vein I always thought the measure of intelligence was the ability to compress information. If you cannot summarize, then you do not understand the subject.
Readit News
1. Attend the lectures and take good notes. Don't write things down that are obvious or that you already know.
2. Before any exam, go back over the dozens of pages of notes and condense them down to 3 or 4 pages, omitting details that will be brought to mind by the things you are writing down.
3. Go back over the 3 to 4 pages, condensing them down to a single page, compactly written.
4. Go back over the single page, condensing it down to a single notecard.
The act of condensing requires you to internalize the knowledge enough to know what you have memorized and what you must still note down. And the act of repeatedly writing down the hard parts commits those to memory too.
By the end, the notecard has a handful of difficult to remember formulas and a bunch of keywords that prompt your memory to recall the salient details. In the US at that time, a single notecard was often allowed during exams, so the final work product was also that card.
(My recall 20 years later is excellent, so this is not cramming.)