For anybody trying to prepare for the nclex, especially foreign-educated nurses ...

I am a UK-educated RN who took an online HURST Review this past July 2015 and passed my NCLEX with 78 questions on first attempt this August 2015. I am so proud =) HURST was undoubtably an indispensable part of my achieving this goal. I would like to encourage NCLEX takers who use HURST to fully commit to the HURST review philosophy of learning the HURST content thoroughly "without doubt and without hesitation" and honing critical thinking skills. You cannot possibly memorize everything, so I agree with HURST that is better to have a solid core of knowledge than to try to know everything, and to use carefully practiced judgement to decide questions where you do not know the content. Questions came up in this exam that concerned diseases/situations I had barely knew about and I had to have strategies to help me work out those questions; strategies like "acute vs chronic" and "pick the killer" answer. HURST content and strategy will help you in this regard.

The only slight variant on that advice I would like to leave here is for nurses like myself who did not train in the USA. For all y'all FENs out there ;0) please remember that reviews like HURST are as the word makes clear - REVIEWS. They assume that a reviewer will be a US nursing school graduate who has covered the US nursing curriculum in-depth at some time in the past. Therefore if there are areas, say for example OB, that you maybe covered only minimally in your foreign nursing education, you may need to allot some study time and a denser textbook to give yourself a more thorough grounding. Some questions - especially SATAs - can be very hard to get right if you don't have this grounding. That is just my opinion for FEN NCLEX takers. Core content teaching is great to help you focus when you have studied nursing at a US nursing school, but it may leave you without "the bigger picture" in a subject, if you have barely covered that subject before at all. Just bare that in mind when planning your study time.

I work full-time in ICU so committing time was hard. I would say I needed about 3 months, with at least two full weeks of that period devoted to NCLEX. I studied the HURST review and did 3 out of 6 of the Q-tests, which I found of roughly equivalent difficulty to the NCLEX. I bought the HURST book and studied and wrote in it until it was practically falling apart. I supplemented this with the Prentice Hall series, LaCharity's Priorization, Delegation and Assignment (if you're acing this I think you're well on your way) and the Lippincott's Alternative Format Q's book. Also liked Davis (it had very challenging questions that I found far harder than NCLEX). I did not, however, take to Kaplan - each to their own, eh.