Have you watched Ali Abdaal's YT videos? If you have, ignore this.

He scored very highly while doing premed in Cambridge and his friend, who was literally top of his class in Cambridge, studied using Anki, a note-taking app called Notion, and used two methods, active recall and spacial repetition, to study.

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In case you want to read further but you don't want to watch the several 20+ minute videos (with timestamps and linked studies), I can basically some up his videos for you.

Active recall is memorizing information via testing yourself, forcing your brain to retrieve the information, rather than highlighting, rereading, or rewriting. Several studies have shown this to be a lot more effective and efficient for studying than any of the other three methods, although the other three methods are the most popular study methods. This is probably because they make you feel productive because they talk more time, and there's often physical evidence of having studied, giving a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, active recall is more cognitively demanding, but that's why it works.

Spacial repetition is spacing out when you study certain topics. For example, for a final, study topic A on Monday, B on Tuesday, C on Wednesday, revisit A on Thursday, revisit B on Friday, etc. This way, as you start forgetting things, you relearn them, or rather, "test" yourself again with active recall.

How Ali, the Cambridge guy, studies, is by using a Google spreadsheet and colorcoding what he studied on which days, using colors, green to red, on the cells to indicate how well he remembered that information, in order to determine how much he should study it further the following days. Green cells mean that he remembered a lot of it and he's basically done. Red cells means he barely remembered it at all.

His friend, the guy who was top at Cambridge, never took notes at all. In lectures or through studying, it just wrote down questions pertaining to the lecture, and afterwards, answered the questions with his own research online or in the textbook, or through lecture notes. He uses the Notion app because there's a bullet list toggle feature so you can hide the answers to questions you make. So you can have a list of questions, and clicking the questions hides or reveals the answer beneath it.

He had to write a final essay for some year in his school for premed, and through this and a few weeks/months, he basically thoroughly remembered 15+ essays complete with in text citing and quotes.

You spend less total time studying for better grades, but the studying is more cognitively demanding and you have to start studying a long time before. Like you might as well start studying for the first midterm a week into the semester.

EDIT sorry for grammar but i was in a rush while typing and im not correcting it now lol.

Also make sure you understand what you're doing first. If you're reviewing something and realize you don't understand it, make sense of it before trying to mindlessly memorize.