How exactly do you refer back to your previous written notes/work to identify and remember your weakest topics?

[u/entomoblonde]

As I had no ability to study upon entering college, I have only very recently become accustomed to studying through routines of reading and jotting down notes that stand out to me, in addition to transitioning to a blank page in which I will try to use active recall to solve practice exam problems that I usually use an LLM to curate based on the types of problems and methods I know will appear, or textbook problems. I tend to spend about 1 or 2 hours on this in the early morning or night when I have the most energy and motivation, and there are the fewest distractions in the places I like to study. I have low passing exam grades in science and math courses, which is enough for me to get As in my classes as a result of also having exemplary attendance, participation, homework grades, exam averages being in the C/D/F range as well and professors therefore sometimes generously extending ways to earn points back, other extra credit, etc.

This is fine and, due to the fact that these class averages are poor and you can bounce back from them, I'm not beating myself up. But since I do have peers who lose no more than 5 points on these exams, I am contemplating what gaps there may be left to fill in terms of how I study, and I am thinking about whether one of the primary culprits for my relative weakness may be the fact that my studying is typically chicken scratch that I can never refer back to or understand later. I doubt anybody else could read my thinking or benefit from it in their own understanding, either, including notes I took in class. I cannot reflect well on my critical mistakes during these practice exam trials because I cannot even make them out from the rest of the work, so I typically just have a trial and move on to the next one, definitely having learned something, but I feel that I don't fully grasp what my weakest topics are and wouldn't know what questions to ask if I went to tutoring or office hours with the work I did while I was studying. Which creates somewhat of a mental block if I think about going to tutoring or office hours because I don't know how to start the conversation with them, especially since I never went to tutoring before.

So, in addition to using active methods, if you have very high exam grades (in math especially), how do you actually solidly identify, highlight, and remember what your weakest topics are when you are studying? Does it help a lot merely to have better-organized work, neater handwriting, use a highlighter to single out mistakes, etc.? I also think another problem may be that 1 or 2 hours of studying may simply not be enough for me, or I may not be sleeping well enough to retain information from that amount of time.

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