Find a study environment where you can work freely without distraction. Once you can get into that habit of interpreting the college experience as a 9-5 job, where your free time is spent going to lectures, it gets a bit easier to manage. As for when I actually got my coursework done, I scheduled the bulk of my work on weekends, while I read the text on weekdays. Reason being that's there's really nothing on TV or the Internet on the weekends to justify procrastination.
As for the overall transitioning to college, I faced the challenge of re-tooling my approach to education. I had to move away from learning by taking notes (lecture) to learning by practicing problems: given these parameters, which formulas are applicable, how to set it up, then evaluate with the values. There was almost no point of trying to rush to take notes when most professors allow their lectures to be podcasted or straight up recorded via laptop computer/cellphone. Record? Yes. That's what your tuition paid for. Go to lecture, record, then write up the notes afterwards. There's reinforcement strategy in there as well.
Some (adjunct) professors are awful at no-name state schools. Well, the professors at state schools geared for research are even worse (because of bad accents, attitudes, etc). Sometimes you won't even know where to go if the assigned textbook is bad, or if you can't understand a situation because a lack of fundamental knowledge; pony up the courage to ask during office hours or asking a TA/GSI -- others will have the same question. As for exams, doing well requires a balance of trying to manage downfalls, as it is to manage confidence; you have to navigate between those. You have to realize it's not a matter of personal intelligence, it's about putting the time in. People establish study groups to hold each other accountable. People establish study groups to divvy up problem sets and to specialize the labor. It's gotten to the point where professors encourage it, although not CS professors.
Writing scientific lab reports? Use your university computers to fetch a copy of any ACS journal (Chemical Reviews are a tad closer to teaching lab reports in terms of style). You will have to write something within that standard even if that requires tools beyond your current skills; Templates/Paragraph Spacing in Word, Matlab, Chemdraw, R for graphs, etc. Make something you can be proud of.
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