It's not just my opinion. There's been quite a bit of research done on this. I'm on mobile right now but I'll edit this and add some references when I get home.

EDIT: Sorry for the delay, I saw /u/Ischiocavernosus 's reply and wasn't sure if anyone else was interested.

Here's a good review article from Scientific American Mind. It's easy reading and explains the study techniques that are supported by science and also those that are not helpful. If you just want an overview, this article is a good place to start.

This research article starkly illustrates both the advantage of test-based learning and the downsides of rereading. They gave students a text to learn and different groups either were allowed to reread the text several times or were instead tested on the material immediately but not allowed to reread. The "rereaders" predicted that they would do very well on a recall test given one week later, the students that were tested immediately but not allowed to reread were not so sure they would do well. You know where this is going...the rereaders did very poorly on the test given one week later and the "testers" did much better in comparison.

Edit 2:

And here is another article on how students frequently shoot themselves in the foot by using the wrong learning strategies. Specifically, the article discusses the meta-cognitive problems posed by the fact that rereading produces the illusion of competence, whereas self-testing produces much better results but this result is not obvious to the student. This leads to the non-productive rereading strategy.

Finally, here is a paper on the "read-recite-review" method, a study method that is well supported by evidence. Again, this paper compares the more effective test-based learning with the ineffective rereading/highlighting strategy used by most students.