I summarize all my notes and readings into a highly condensed, handwritten form. The act of writing and processing the information ensures for maximum pickup of all the information. And the notes you produce are wonderful for reinforcing what you learned by skimming through them.
yes times 10. it will help you if you have written it down by hand. oddly enough this even works better if you have shoddy penmanship. you'll know that you wrote it. you know that you have struggled to read that bit some 15ish times and you'll know where that bit is. page 3 right below the coffee stain.
you will try to remember one bit and your mind just goes "that shoddy bit I wrote which was not quite correct, which I remebered every time I read that pile of papers, but it was two pages further on somewhere in the lower half. crossed something out there... it was....."
memory does not work that way for everybody but for me this was how I aced highschool. taking detailed handwritten notes during class helps as well (especially if you are later able to quote the teach word by word), bit late for that for you I guess. same principle though. you processed that information once, revisited some weeks later and you might not grasp or be able to read all of it. lots of neurons firing. then you condense it and the next day you try and make sense of it.
your end goal is to have one page, very tightly written, of info. it does not matter how in-depth your course is. you want one page of info. imagine trying to write a cheat-sheet which can only be one page. you will not use this as a cheat-sheet but you will prepare it that way. one page, easily hidden somewhere and chock-full of information. you have to reduce the information you need more and more in order to put it all on that one cheat-sheet. by writing that cheat-sheet you will want to include the bits you do not know yet. the next draft you will ommit some of those bits. next draft you might write one piece back in which you constantly forget, if only by mentioning one word and putting a lot of exclamation marks next to it.
get that one sheet of paper you would want as a means to cheat. spend the last week just studying that one piece of paper (and rechecking bits you don't quite know by heart in your notes or books, make annotations to your one sheet of paper). try to take note of blotches on the paper, tears, stains, things you have crossed out. noting where you are not 100% correct is a blast because everytime you read that bit you will go "yes, but the thing is....." and you will be aware of the better version. every single time.
it is the easy version of that organizing your brain into compartments thing for people with a brain that tends to work on visual memory.
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