Whittle Down Material For Simpler Studying

Disclaimer: this method works best in preparation for large, objective exams that cover a lot of factual material.  The material for interpretive, subjective, exams doesn't lend itself to this kind of studying quite as well.

When you have a big exam coming up and a pile of notes covering a third (or more) of a semester even a couple of times studying straight through can be very time consuming.  In these situations, it's best to focus your studying specifically on the notes which are going to provide the greatest marginal gains in understanding.  Essentially, you need to study the areas that you don't already understand pretty well.  There's no need to keep reading over notes you know well just because they're interspersed between notes you don't know.

Once you've been through your notes enough that you are fairly familiar with them, it's time to start whittling down.  Start on a blank page of a notebook and go through your class notes sequentially, copying over the concepts you aren't comfortable with.  When you get through your class notes, you should be left with a new set, much more concise and manageable than your un-filtered notes.  You now have the time benefit of being able to skip the notes you don't need to study anymore, plus you've copied over the difficult concepts by hand, which is a great way to commit them to memory by itself. Put your old notes aside, and focus on reviewing the stuff you really need to work on.

I've found that if I use this method after two complete times through my initial notes, I can cut the bulk down by about 3/4, making subsequent studying much quicker.  Often, I use the method one more time the day before an exam to create a one-page cheat sheet of the few concepts/facts I'm having trouble remembering.  Then I can hit that one-pager hard right up until the test starts, focusing my last minute efforts on the areas where I need them most.

If you have an obscene amount of notes, or you start with this method early in the study process, you might benefit from more than one "whittle," but I've found that I'm usually most efficient when I keep it two one big cut and then the last minute one-pager I described.  After all, it does take time to copy over notes, even if it's only a small fraction of the whole.  Experiment and find the timing and amount of "cut" that works best for you.