For the last few years I have been using a Windows program called "Supermemo" to study for the exams, among other things.
The short version is that a Polish guy developed this software while working on his PhD dissertation about memory and learning. It started as a flash-card program that kept statistics about your rate of learning and reshuffled the cards according to those statistics.
Latest version SuperMemo 15 has evolved into a powerful research & writing platform: You can dump in web pages, whole e-books, PDFs, and via ABBYY Fine Reader, basically anything you can OCR, graphics and all, add the bibliographic data, and proceed, over a period of months or years, to cut up large texts into small ones and small ones into flash cards. This feature is called "incremental reading" and it is my favorite aspect of SuperMemo.
Every day I add a few articles, cut up a few articles, and delete a few things that I have kept the nuggets from. I put in the state statutes and codes related to surveying a couple of years ago, and that familiarity really paid off when I took the ethics exam last year.
Sometimes my eyes glaze over on a given review article. I can't quite see where to start editing, what notes to make, or I am not sure if I believe or agree with the material. So I skim it, and let it go by. It will return in a few days, and might make more sense then. Some things are obtuse for months, yet I know there is something to learn there. Frequently these are Beerleg posts about surveying stuff like legal principles, case law, bona fide rights, occupation, aquiescence, repose. Mostly stuff that is not about measurement! So it winds up being a placeholder for a web search for more detail or more opinion.
SuperMemo. Best $49 I ever spent on software.
