I hate nursing exams - Page 4

LOL Admitting wrong indicates that you are fairly close to self-actualization.

Perhaps you need to do something in the science related field that you love so much? The fact is if your program has a 99-100% NCLEX pass rate they are testing correctly. Tough. Suck it up. Adjust or go to a program that you feel is adequate for your vast intelligence. Nursing is the ability to prioritize and critically think. Sometimes it is not a situation that is concrete. You have to assess a complex situation quickly. Not everything is cookie cutter. PRIORITIZING. Your program won't change, but maybe you need to rethink your career choice.

I can understand where the OP is coming from. I have a BS as well, and I found that nursing exams seemed really, almost, oversimplified. Yes you have to learn critical thinking and prioritization. But toward the end of school, I figured out that to do well on my nursing tests, you seemed to have to learn the one weird fact about, well, everything. How do you position a patient who just had a lobectomy? What do you do in a suspected air embolism? What bizarre side effect does this med have?

Just my two cents. I don't really think studying for NCLEX or taking NCLEX can make or break a person as a nurse.

At this stage in your education, you should not need the lure of a good grade to motivate you to study. You need your own knowledge and critical thinking to understand that learning the materials to use in practice is far more important than learning it for a test. If you are only motivated by good tests, then you are going to find yourself in the wrong field once you are out of school.

I have not found people who are less motivated to study for nursing than they are for other courses. Perhaps I saw that in the early terms, but now as I approach graduation in less than 2 months, my classmates are all working towards greater ability to critically think AND how to best prepare for NCLEX. Our grades are important, but so is our ability to function as an almost nurse in the clinical setting. Whether you study for the test is irrelevant if you cannot care for your patient in the clinical setting. The actual ability to perform patient care should be sufficient to motivate you to learn those facts you need to know. The critical thinking comes with time and experience.

Ultimately, you are going to learn to be an excellent nurse on the floor of your first job. Nursing school is giving you a broad overview of the basics to superimpose on your A&P and Patho courses and preparing you to take the exam that will determine whether or not you get to take a job on a floor of a hospital or other location and learn to be a nurse.

It seems as though you've forgotten the goal, which is to GRADUATE. Yes you took o-chem, and that's an accomplishment. But this isn't o-chem. you're not going to change the system, so you better work within it.

I hate the way our nursing exams are written. The faculty does not spell or grammar check them and the wording is poor. My ATI predictor tests are usually "Level 3" indicating a passing level on the NCLEX and I do well with the questions from our textbook publisher and the Saunders NCLEX book/CD but when I take a nursing process exam I do well to make a B (I don't suffer from test anxiety either). I feel that the instructors should draw their questions from professionally written sources such as ATI or do what they do for powerpoint slides- copy and paste from the textbook publishers website. I have several times picked the second best answer and been marked wrong because the correct one was misspelled and I thought it was a trick. If enough student argue about a given question the reply is "We will look at it" then they give everybody credit for it.

The ambiguity is the real problem though, we were once given this question;
A nurse is obtaining a sexual health history for a 20 year old client which of the following should she do?
A. inform the client that they must be HIV tested (obviously not)
B. ask if the client performs testicular exams (Hmmm, does the client have testicles? Or s/he does them on a friend?)
C. ask for date of LMP (maybe, unless they have testicles)
D. ask the age of all sexual partners (unless there was some reason to suspect this person is abusing someone, uh no)

It turns out the question should have read "a 20 year old FEMALE client" which would have made it stupidly easy given the choices. They wound up giving the entire class credit for it but still didn't spell check the next test