What are some suggestions to deal with this situation?

What about:
a.) Asking the owner of the book if you can use a highlighter in it?
b.) Use Post-it notes to mark the pages?
c.) Scan or photocopy the pages?

This is how I currently am doing college. 1. Read question. 2. Search and destroy (it’s probably questioned in chronological order) 3. Make an educated answer, as in, talk about it and add opinions and really just answer each question 1 by 1.

These exercises are just meant to generally get you to form an opinion on what you thought about the “situation”.

I like the Post-it notes idea from pied

Sticky notes for the win. They have worked for me from high school all the way to history grad school ;)
Or, ya know, you can take notes on paper for each page you read… I’ve always done that too. It makes the material stick in your brain better than just reading and highlighting, which is a passive activity.

Place a sheet protector over the page and highlight to your heart’s content.

Write down keywords. Keywords should be such that that after seeing it you should recall things associated with it.

Don’t bother with the highlighter; you’ll just end up highlighting instead of reading. Better to paraphrase the juicy bits in your notebook.

Read through the questions before you do the assigned reading, keep them handy as you go through the chapter and write the answers as you find them.

For general studying, I used to read alongside my class notes, and create new notes that incorporated the important components of both. I found that rewriting and rearranging the information from lecture and text into a way my brain understood it helped me comprehend and retain the information more effectively. I also would play back taped lectures during note review to pick up on points I might have missed.

For your scenario, I like the ideas others have suggested: review the Questions first, then flag the sections in the book with post-it’s and put annotations on the sticky. If you have a smartphone or tablet, there are apps that allow you to ‘scan’ a document, and probably some apps that would allow you to highlight on the document – if you need to access the information when the book is not in your possession.

@hearkat Could you give me the name of the app?

@HeartsLove7 – I know there are several scanning apps for iOS, I have GeniusScan on my iPhone, but there are others. Evernote may allow you to scan, but many other Apps have the option to export images into Evernote. I have seen Apps that allow you to mark on images. There are iPad Apps for note-taking that I haven’t explored, either. I really can’t recommend any, because I don’t have much use for such apps, but I know they exist. I suggest you search the options that are available for your device(s) to find what best serves your needs.

Answer the questions as you go along in the reading.

I think hearkat made some excellent suggestions—especially about incorporating multiple sources of information (text, class notes, audio). I would add that it might be a good time to undo your habit of relying on highlighting. Research shows that passive behaviors like note-taking do very little to help encode information in one’s memory. Taking your own written notes is far more useful, and as hearkat said, integrating what your reading with other known information is the best method.

Also if it is a text book that you might be able to borrow again, a useful note-taking strategy is to write Page # / Paragraph # / Line # before each note you write so that you can refer back to the parts that sparked your idea in the first place. You’ll often find that information is visually associated with a page and a region on the page, as well. For example, while taking an exam, you might recall that the answer was near the bottom of the page near a photo, and as you focus on that visual orientation, the content often springs back into consciousness.