I passed NCLEX (and here's what I did)

I graduated nursing school in December, took my NCLEX-RN Monday, and found out I passed today. I took the exam at 2PM in Texas and finished 75 questions in 40 minutes, walking out at 2:42. I thought my entire test was easy. I know that's going to tick some of you off, but it's the truth. Almost every answer (including the SATA/alternative format questions I had) seemed obvious to me, which is how I breezed through it. I'm going to share what I did.

1) I took advantage of my clinicals. For those of you still in school, do this. During my ER rotation, I spent a great deal of time looking at EKG strips. Let me tell you that I didn't have a single patient in the ER with an EKG strip that looked anything remotely like the cookie cutter ones in my books. I volunteered to do the EKGs and talked them over with my preceptor. I'm so glad I did this, because I had an overwhelming number of strips on my boards and recognized them AND what to do with them immediately. I know not all of you will have loads of EKG strips, but the concept is true for everything. Use your preceptors. Use your charge nurse. Use the physicians. I learned more about the endocrine system while observing and chatting with a physician performing a thyroidectomy than I did in class. What he said stuck with me, especially seeing it live.

2) Hurst review videos. Someone passed onto me her DVDs and workbook, and Marlene Hurst is like a holy being. As I was taking it, I heard her in my head going, "you going to see THAT patient first? That's fine, if you want the one with the obvious signs and symptoms of a GI obstruction to die." Doing the review and studying the packet was incredible.

3) I did practice questions. I had the Saunders book as well as a few others books, but to be honest, I didn't crack them open that much. I'm not the type of person who can sit there and read and retain information. I have to actively be doing something, and questions seemed to be the right thing to me. About six months ago, I registered for Lippincott's Question service (the point), and I started doing questions. I went from doing 20 a day when I had lots of homework to doing 150/day after I graduated. I read the rationales. ALL the rationales. If I got 45/50 questions right on a test, I still read all 50 rationales. Doing this reinforced the information I already knew, taught me information I didn't, and more than that, it offered me the CORRECT rationale for questions I answered correctly even though my thought process wasn't correct. This taught me how to 'think' NCLEX. And furthermore, I would say that about 50/75 questions I had on the NCLEX were VERY similar to questions I answered on Lippincott. And the other information I pulled from things Marlene taught me.

4) While taking the NCLEX, I had a strategy that worked mostly for all my questions. Whenever I read a question, I thought to myself, "what is it asking?" Then, I answered. If it's a priority question, you think, "which patients are stable?" If someone has had an issue for a while, they're fine to wait a few more minutes. If it's acute onset/immediate post-op, there's a good chance that's your answer. If it's an intervention question, you think FIRST OF ALL, "is my patient in danger?" then think, "Patient over equipment," and then think, "what solves the problem, if there is one?" That's all there is to it. I found a lot of my questions had answers that involved harming my patient. NEVER HARM YOUR PATIENT! If your patient has mag toxicity, TURN OFF THE MAG. If your equipment says one thing, but you see another, LOOK AT YOUR PATIENT!

Anyway, hope this helps, especially for anyone like me who's more hands on/active and hates sitting there reading for long periods.