Studying for Exams

A student recently asked how I studied for exams back in my day. I never tried to study in libraries because I discovered that studying required me to talk out loud. I would work up my class notes, case briefs, and so on into a single mammoth outline of the course (commercial outlines and treatises were used only to fill gaps). I would then sit in my room with this one document on my lap and read it out loud - over and over again until I could do it from memory. Somehow that process crammed what I needed to know into short term memory, which I could then dump into the exam. Even more oddly, the exam literally was a memory dump - I would walk out of the exam unable to remember a thing about the subject (some of it came back years later, of course).