11 Ways to Review and Edit Your Notes

Read your notes within two hours or less of taking them. The rate that the human mind forgets things is beyond human belief.
While reading your notes, try to decipher what you wrote in your notes. This can be difficult, at times, so you many need to ask a friend for help on this task.
Use three pens. A dark, black pen to underline the key points in the lecture. A green (or other color) pen to underline points you are unclear of and will need to review in more depth later. A red pen to highlight the things your instructor says will definitely be on the exam.
One technique which has been found to be successful is to attempt to paraphrase each important point that the instructor made in the lecture.
Try to outline the contents of the lecture.
Make a list of all of the important or key words. Keep that list at the front or back pages of your notebook for each course so you can reference it easily.
After reading your notes within a couple hours at most, write three possible exam questions for each lecture. This may not seem particularly easy, at first, but after the first exam or two, you will start to get proficient at it.
Try to answer the questions you just wrote in item 6 correctly.
Keep a second notebook to keep a summary of each lecture. You may wonder if this is necessary. Do it anyway.
Keep an audio tape journal of your progress in each course. Start the recorder when you are reviewing your notes and talk about what you think were the important points in that day's lecture. Later, listen to the notes you narrated.
Take a short-course or seminar in note-taking.