Make a schedule of your daily classes, meals and extracurricular activities. Block off any free time you have in the evenings and between classes and designate as much of it as you can to study time, preferably at least two hours a day. Stick to this schedule as much as possible to ensure that you have enough study time.
Find a quiet place to study. This might be the library, a park, a coffee shop or even your own dorm room. Be sure to avoid any areas with a lot of people, especially if it is a loud setting. You don't want to have to fight distractions while trying to study.
Read your textbooks carefully for content. Don't simply skim through the material quickly for the sake of getting it read, but rather take the time to make sure that you really understand what you are reading. Take notes over the material since writing it down will help you remember it better.
Summarize what you have read into your own words, rewording the content into concepts you can understand and remember. Make the material your own.
Highlight significant passages in your textbooks. Do not highlight everything, but rather only the most pertinent parts that you can later go back and quickly read through. Also, do not underline, since that makes finding and memorizing important passages more difficult.
Take careful notes in your classes. Find out from your professor at the beginning of the semester if tests will come directly from lectures. If that is the case, you will need to be more thorough in what you write down. If not, focus on writing down the most significant points of a lecture so that you will only have the most important information to study later on.
Work with a partner in preparation for a test, asking each other questions from the textbook and lecture notes. Asking and answering questions aloud with another person will help enforce the information in your memory. When working with another person, though, make sure to stay focused on studying.
Make flashcards for studying vocabulary words, names of people, places and important dates. Have another person go through these with you since saying the answers aloud will (again) help stamp the information into memory.
Review textbook materials, lecture notes and flashcards starting two or three days before an exam. Do not wait until the night before to begin studying; you will retain less information this way and end up being tired during the test, when you need to be the most alert.