Just took the HESI (pretty long post) :)

Published Oct 29, 2014

1 Post

So this is my first post, and I'm just super excited to have the weight of the HESI off my shoulders and wanted to share my experience! I definitely did this the hard way, but it paid off in the end. Or I'm just lucky. Maybe.

I signed up for the HESI last week after looking at my school's testing center availability and finding out that I wouldn't have time to take the test at all in November, December, or January because the only available times were during my classes... except October 29th, which is pretty early to be taking it since the nursing school application is due February 1st! And then there was the fact that this gave me exactly 6 days to study for an exam I didn't know anything about. Commence extreme stress.

My school only makes you take the reading comprehension, anatomy & physiology, and math sections. For the A&P, the recommendation was to take a full year of anatomy (anatomy 1 and 2), but I've only taken anatomy 1. I was pretty worried because I only had 6 days to study a semester's worth of physiology for this test, and I had other tests in my regular classes that I had to worry about this week too.

I spent like 2 or 3 hours studying anatomy every day with quizlets, and I checked out the Elsevier Admission Assessment Exam Review book from my school's library and memorized all the anatomy in it. I wasn't worried about the reading comprehension at all, so I didn't look at any of that, and I spent maybe an hour learning math conversions (ounces, cups, pints, quarts, gallons, etc). I'm pretty proficient in math, so I didn't practice much. Like I said, my main worry was anatomy.

Well, today was the day of the test, and I was super nervous! I had a microbiology test today too that got swept onto the backburner for this HESI. Here's to hoping I did well on that

Anyway, I had 3 hours to take the test (3 sections) and only used 80 minutes of it. You can choose what order you do the sections, so I did the anatomy section first.

The anatomy questions were mostly about location on the body of hormones and parts of organs. Before I took the HESI, I knew nothing about hormones, so I really focused on them while studying, and I'm so glad I did! A lot of the questions asked which hormone was secreted by which gland, and what the hormones' functions were. Some of the questions were concepts, such as why a body part functions the way it does given the circumstances. Anatomy was the toughest section for me, but I still did well, especially for the amount of time and experience I had.

The reading section had a lot of theme questions and a lot of questions asking for the purpose of the articles. Most of it was straightforward (what did X word mean in sentence 5) and the passages were not as long as I expected. It was pretty easy.

The math section had a calculator available, so there is no need to do any multiplication or division by hand. I'd say that most of the problems were ratios. There were also lots of conversions and a few word problems that involved simple multiplication or addition. I just memorized metric conversions and how to change cups into pints, etc. It was a lot of the same type of problem with different numbers plugged in, so there's really not a lot of memorizing needed.

Overall, I got a 95.33% on the HESI. I'm pretty proud of myself, because I only had 6 days to study and I haven't had anatomy 2 yet! Here's my scores and subscores:

Reading comprehension: 98% (49 out of 50)

Meaning-Word use: 100%
Conclusions: 100%
Implications: 100%
Understanding: 94%

Anatomy & Physiology: 88% (22 out of 25)

Math: 100% (50 out of 50)

Cumulative score: 95.33%

There were two little learning style and personality style tests at the end that didn't count for anything (each one was 14 questions, I think), but they were interesting.

Learning style: Visual/Global

Personality style: Creative/People

Okay, so I am aware that this is probably the longest post ever and people probably only really care about what will help them on this test. I was just ranting because I'm excited that I'm done :) I can't really say what will help people specifically because everyone learns differently, and I learn well under pressure, but I know a lot of people don't. But for me, the Elsevier book and quizlets were mostly sufficient. The 3 anatomy questions I missed were all questions that weren't from the book, and I just didn't know them. So maybe I'll learn the answers in class. I'm excited that my score keeps me a good candidate for nursing school!

TL;DR - I had 6 days to prepare for the HESI and did awesome. Anatomy was hard, but maybe because I haven't had 2 semesters of anatomy yet. Reading was easy. Math was easy (memorize conversions). The end.