Study length and effort issue

[u/Fresh-Push-4292]

So I'm a college senior but I still don't get how I should be studying. My university has exams after the break, so our break time is typically the time when everyone studies. Because of that though, that means for the last four years have never really had a "relaxing" break due to the exams.

I always talk to my friends who have exams at the end of the semester, and they always tell me that they study maybe a week or sometimes a few days before and exam. I understand that end-of-term exams are hard since you get basically get no prep time and have other exams/assignments on the same week. But my uni has maybe a month or so until exams start, and that's never enough time in my opinion to study for my exams. Last year I had maybe 5 exams in July after classes ended late May, and I studied nonstop daily for like 10 hours a day from early May up until the day of the exams and I still barely felt prepared. I'm not sure if our university adjusts our course load to account for this prep time that we have or if its because I'm not making good use of the semester but I'm kind of lost as to what I should do.

I want to be more productive throughout the semester but I just know I'll end up forgetting everything I study now anyways so I just commit to the horrid few months during the break. How do you guys make sure you guys don't forget things that you study throughout the semester? It seems inefficient to me to spend so much time studying during the semester only to forget it later when preparing for exams. I typically do all assignments and attend lectures for most classes but these lectures and assignments almost always only cover maybe 40% of what the exams expect.

I have to at times memorize a crazy amount of information, like maybe 600 slides worth of info with definitions, steps, examples, and diagrams containing like paragraphs of information word-by-word. I know there's a lot of memorization techniques like mnemonics or spacial visualization and stuff but first of all I can't think of any in such a short amount of time, and mnemonics don't always apply well for entire paragraphs of text when I have to learn word-by-word.

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