Sage advice! I would add two things:
1- Your approach to learning should be context dependent. Some courses, like history, are rote memorization, others yield to understanding the system, like organic chemistry. I saw many fellow students struggle with orgo, trying to memorize every reaction. I understood the theoretical mechanistic systematics, I could figure it out for myself without having to memorize it. Foreign languages: you don’t learn them by memorizing definitions and translating everything into English, you learn them by understanding the words per se. This is important for another reason — there’s not always a 1:1 correspondence between word meanings in different languages. It’s like a Venn diagram — part of the meanings are the same in both languages, but then there are nuances that differ. Like, the use of “however” in English might have to be rendered by one of six different words in German to accurately capture the nuance of the word in a particular context.
The context also includes what you need to get out of the course. Some courses are just “check the box” for “certification” — your degree. Memorize, pass the course, forget. Like I had to take Russian to check the box. Was never going to have to use it(all the articles in the relevant Russian journals were published in a simultaneous English translation by the State Department), so I just memorized the exam question’s answers. Same with English lit, anthro, etc. — box checking. But my major field, I had to know, and more importantly, understand everything to be able to pursue a career in that subject.
2- Listen to and know your professor. I had one course where the exam was about a highly-disputed phenomenon. My own judgement lay on one side of the dispute, but I knew that the professor had studied with the proponent of the other side. I knew that he was going to want people to spout his personal preference, so, despite disagreeing, I parroted that interpretation and got an A. One prof had just written a book on American History from 1929 to the present. He said he was just going to lecture about that book, and we didn’t have to come to the lectures, just go to the quiz sections. Listening to him and skipping the lectures saved me five hours a week.