I just wanted to share my thoughts as many of you are taking your boards soon. I passed my ANCC FNP exam today. In January I sent my application to ANCC and pre-registered to have my transcripts sent from my school to both the ANCC and BON. I graduated on May 11 and my transcripts were sent from my school on May 20th. It took about a week and a half for my transcripts to arrive and be processed at ANCC/BON. I got my ATT from ANCC on May 31st. During this time I decided to register for the AANP exam as well (figured if I failed one I'd have the other to fall back on). AANP processed my application fairly quickly and I got the ATT one week (today) after my ANCC (except you really have to wait like another week to actually schedule exam for AANP as prometric has to give you the identification number whereas ANCC gave me the number immediately...so that was kind of weird).
Before I had scheduled my exam I started reading through Fitzgerald Nurse Practitioner Certification Examination and Practice Preparation 3rd Ed. I also have her CD's as well as Barkley's but really didn't like hearing their voices and I don't do well with auditory learning anyways. One week before my exam I started to really study - I finished the Fitzgerald book - while studying I actually made notes of things I needed to remember or what I thought they might ask me - so I have a huge notebook of notes that I intended to go review but never did. I still think this really helped instill some of the tough stuff. I also did the APEA Q Bank and I think it was helpful although a little pricey. I started to memorize the questions/answers after awhile so that wasn't helpful. 5 days before the exam I bought 5 practice exams from familynpprep.com and I did one each evening after studying - I recommend this! I studied for like 12 hours each day one week before the exam - I did this for NCLEX too and it seems to work for me. I went back through the questions and read the rationales for each one - even ones that I got right. Another thing I did was research something that I didn't know if it came up in the practice exam - terms, meds, diseases etc. I think that was very helpful. One last thing I did was I bought the ANCC book from the ANCC site - it also was pricey but contained extremely valuable information about the dreaded part of the ANCC which was the professional/legal section. At least read the first few chapters if you can as some of the questions were derived directly from there. Unfortunately I did not have time to finish the ANCC book prior to my test, but I actually plan on referring to it for practice as well - it's nice and thorough. I know a lot of people don't want to sign up for the ANCC d/t the legal questions etc. but actually it did not seem like there were THAT many and I think you could use common sense to answer quite a few of them. That being said, the questions that I really had NO CLUE were some of the legal/research ones whereas the clinical ones were pretty straight forward.
WHEW! So hopefully that helps anyone studying right now. I know I was really looking for some udpated information while I was studying and couldn't find much.
ps. my exam did not tell me I passed right away - the screen was blank for a long time then just told me thank you. I had to wait until the lady printed it out and gave me the paper saying I passed.
