passed nclex the second time

Nursing Students NCLEX

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Just wanted to share my experience and hopefully inspire others to keep going! The first go round, I had a big head and didnt think that I, an honors student with a great gpa who had passed the "more difficult" hesi exam on the first try, needed to study. Well 3 hours, 265 questioms, and a full onnmental breakdown later, I realized I was wrong.i was totally unprepared for it. It had been a few months since I graduated, and my biggest problem was unfamiliarity with the nclex question format. When I hit 75 questions and my exam didnt shut off, I was shocked. I started to panic and wound up just clicking answers to get through the test. I was so embarassed, ashamed, and ****** that I had failed.

My second go round, I walked in and 77 questions later I walked out feeling so confident. The pearson vue trick no longer worked at this point, and I wasnt risking my 200 dollars, so I waited 2 days to get my quick results which confirmed that I had passed. (Side note: I didnt know the PVT was no longer reliable so when I atte, pted it and got the cc page my heart sunk..... thankfully I found out they had fixed/altered the glitch!)

Anyways, here are some suggestions that helped me pass the second time!

- take the test at 8 am. Waiting around all day is horrible for anxiety in even the most confident test takers

- focus on questions, not content. Practice questions got me used to the style of nclex questions, and content based questions were few and far between. I seriously recommend prioritization, delegation, and assaignment by lacharity. It is the only thing I paid for (no kaplan or hurst reviews, just free online questions and a saunders book with questions I had from school)

- dont believe a lot of the myths! Ihad less than 10 SATA questions and one alterante format.... thats it! The rest were multiple choice. Theres rumors that the more sata/medication questions you get the better you are doing, but this isnt always the case! I had TONS of those the first time I took the test and failed, and hardly any when I passed.

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Thank you so much for inspiring those of us who have failed the NCLEX on the first attempt!

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Just out of curiosity....what was your HESI exit exam score? I was feeling pretty good about mine (945) and was hoping that it would actually give me a good indication that I was going to be OK for the test.

I still plan to study, and do practice questions ect, but I don't want it to give me a false since of security either.

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Congratulations RN!

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I got either 925 or 935 on HESI, and that was the main reason I didnt study. But seriously after doing tons of practice questions, and maybe because I already knew what to expect the second time lol, I walked out of the exam feeling so confident! Just get used to the format and you will do great!

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