If possible, I like to allocate full attention to listening to the lecturer instead of dividing it between such and taking notes. However, this isnt always feasible. It helps if there is a slidepack or something similar that will be avaliable afterwards. Most of the time, I'm trying to build a mental construct for how all of the things that I'm learning fit together. Depending on the difficulty of the material, I may need to begin creating this construct pretty soon so I can understand the material, or it may be able to wait until pretty close to the exam. (If I'm not having to take notes, I can start doing it in class, which is more efficient and effective.) I try to fill in the gaps in my mental model with a list of questions to ask in office hours. In the process, the structure of the material becomes a bit more evident. Is it very interconnected, either in a logical or physical sense? Is it something that seems to be made of arbitrary facts? If the latter, and the material is neither interesting nor useful nor required, I will be tempted to drop the class. If it is interesting or useful, facts stick much better, as I can think about how I can use them, how they help me understand things in such a manner that I can more easily affect them. Not sure that I personally have found many classes interesting but not useful if they lack a structure. If neither, but required, I prefer creating a structure that helps me link things together in a way that will help me remember them. A memorable example was committing a picture of the amino acid table to memory and then stepping through it vertically, horizontally, diagonally to make it stick. A structure that can be useful here is to repeat all past memorized items when memorizing a list. So A, then AB, then ABC, and so on. I like pictures, lists, and cheat sheets (often worth making for me to help memtal organization even if I can't take them into a test) for the facts that don't fit in my mental model, or just as redund

Focus on grokking, on understanding, rather than remembering.