How Kaplan helped me pass in 75 questions!

Okay, so I just found out I passed my NCLEX today in 75 question. NEVER throughout nursing school would I think that I would be someone who could do that. Here is how I passed on my first try..

I wasn't a genius in nursing school. I worked my butt off and made the grades, but I was never a straight A student.

BEST ADVICE --> study the information like you will need to use it forever.. since you will! Do not study just to forget the next day, it will make studying for NCLEX that much harder and more time consuming.

I took the four day Kaplan online course and I know some people think that they don't need to learn strategies to answer NCLEX questions but trust me. EVERYONE can benefit from the course and its awesome! I was definitely thinking about each question differently after the course using the Decision Tree. Try to stay open to any and all help to get ready for this test.

Kaplan Nursing online --> THE BEST RESOURCE in my opinion to prepare for NCLEX. please do not feel discouraged if you are not hitting the goal scores on each of the question trainers and qbanks, because I definitely didn't! They key is to take your time and truly remediate ALL questions, even if you got them right, and to look up topics/content in your content book if need be.

I made tables in Microsoft word with 3 columns (one to type out the question, one to write all the answer choices, and one to type out why the correct answer was correct and why the others were wrong) and then as many rows for the number of questions the practice test had (so a 75 question test would have 3 columns and 75 rows).

It was very time consuming and you feel like you should be studying content from the book but reading the explanations from the practice questions really helped just in themselves.

For those who do not know, the goal scores for question trainers on Kaplan are:

QT1-5 should >65

QT 6&7 should be >60 (all analysis/application questions)

Here were my scores:

QT1 57.3%

QT2 68%

QT3 56%

QT4 55.3%

QT5 62%

QT6 59%

QT7 61.5%

So, as you can see, I was all over the place. But do not let a lower score make you think you will fail! It is truly the time and work you put into remediating that helps with NCLEX. You won't even realize you are absorbing so much information as you are.

You CAN do this! I know everyone says that but you really can. The NCLEX is not impossible, it just has to be your full time job for a few weeks :) Let me know if you guys have any further questions I would be HAPPY to answer them.

Good luck everyone!

- New RN