I have appreciated all previous posts on this matter ,and just wanted to reach out and ask if anyone has taken the 2016 version (or other other recent versions) of the AANP FNP exam (as most of the other posts are a bit outdated). I am looking for any type of advice on this exam (regarding prep work, or even day of/week of advice. I am currently scheduled to take the exam at the end of this month (in two weeks).
As for prep work thus part I have purchased and completed the Fitzgerald Review, Read Leik's most recent book and done the corresponding questions in the back of the book, and have taken the AANP FNP practice exam on their website, only scoring a 72% (66% is passing on this exam). This of course made me a little more anxious than I already was. After taking the practice exam, I've realized my weak areas and plan to spend some time on those in the next two weeks.
Any other words of advice on this matter, are definitely welcome! Thank you in advance!!
OK, so I took the AANC exam this week and passed. It was my first attempt at passing either exam. My plan was to take the AANC as practice to see where I stood and to take the AANP after strengthening my weak areas, and hopefully passing. Let me give you a little background and maybe it will help some of you. I graduated from my FNP program in May 2012. I was working in an area where certification was not necessary and I kept putting it off. Not the smartest thing any of us can do, but where would any of us be without a couple of really good rationalizations in our lives? I am north of 50 years old and I hope that is helpful for some of my colleagues considering this path.
The exam. I cannot tell you anything that has not already been posted on several of the exam blogs here.. It has all been covered. What I can tell you is be careful with practice questions. I looked up the correct information on peer reviewed sites like UpToDate. I found a many arbitrary or flat our wrong answers in the 600+ questions in the back of the Leik 2nd Ed as well as Fitzgerald's 4th. I still highly recommend both, but verify the information. Do not take any source as correct if you think it might be incorrect, look it up. I took Fitzgerald's course upon graduating because it was required in my program in 2009. She is very knowledgeable and some really good information (more geared toward practice than passing). I did not like her course because every topic and ever sentence began with I, In my practice, etc. There is so much wasted time on what she picked up, what she did. It might be OK for others, but with my ADD I found it distracting. Three years ago I was able to take Barkley as CE's paid for by my job. I believe they all are about equal and they did not really reflect the exam, at least the ANCC.
What I found valuable was questions, lots of questions and looking up the correct answers if I got them wrong. I also found Paul Bolin's CRASH videos invaluable. (crash usmle step 2 and 3 paul bolin - Youtube)
Lastly, there was a lot of leadership, management, nursing theory. My program was big on leadership and management and a lot came back enough for a good educated guess. There are very few knowledge based questions, they are mostly analysis, application and synthesis questions.
How I approached the questions. I crossed out the two distracters immediately (most of the time they were obvious). If I knew the answer (or was pretty sure) I selected my answer and moved on. On the questions I was queasy on I marked them for review. On the questions I did not know, I kept comparing the 2 answers left with the stem (past/present/future tense, etc) and finally went with my gut (first instinct). I guess what I'm saying is work the question and not the content when you do not know the answer and give your best guess.
So take a review course, use one or more of the books recommended on this blog, and search out the correct rational on our own. Paul Bolin gives a complete medical review online for free and you can access as much or as little as you need. Lastly, Lots and lots of questions. Search out allnurses for the best places for exam questions. The best resource I found was the FNP Exam Blogs on Allnurses. Thank all of you who have posted here for the confidence to take the exam and the excellent study advice. Good luck to all. If I can pass so can you.
I am going to be sitting for boards on Friday. I am consistently scoring between 63% and 77% on the Board Vitas exams and 64% to 75% on the APEA predictors. I have more scores in the 70-77 range than not but the few 63-70% scores are concerning me. Does anyone have any experience with Board Vitals? At this point I have done the Fitzgerald online course and her Certification prep book, the APEA online course and QBank, and have been studying the Leik book. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Looks like you are doing all of the right things. Do not get too nervous and let the exam defeat you..... After the Leik/Fitzgerald book(s) I believe questions, questions, questions.... Also test taking techniques.... Good Luck... FNPinNY
I just took the AANP FNP and the ANCC FNP exam and passed both. The AANP exam is a very straightforward entry level exam. The test questions are just like the ones on the PSI site where you register to take the exam. Out of 150 questions, I marked 2 that I was unsure of. The exam I thought was much easier than the NCLEX for the RN. The ANCC test was different as I had numerous questions on Medicaid, Medicare, HIPPA, ethical questions, Hospice, and various research studies. Also, on the ANCC I had questions on which drug would be the most cost effective to prescribe for a certain diagnosis, which they do not teach in the review courses. I took both Hollier's and Fitzgerald's review courses. Good luck to everyone out there preparing for the exams, and if you have any questions just let me know and I will be gladly to offer you more information.
Congrats to everyone who passed their boards! @irbatb2 - I was wondering, if you know the answer to the questions, is it pretty easy to pick out from all the options? Or did you find that two answers were very similar with very little diferrentiation ? For instance, if the correct answer was penicillin, would there be two answers with different strength or different length of times?
The questions are textbook questions that you would know the answer to. I was very shocked at how they was not trying to trick you at all. In the review courses they say the hardest questions are typically at the beginning; however, I thought they was all straightforward and the test was overall pretty simple.
I have been on this site since I started studying for my NCLEX in 2012. I got numerous ideas on how to tackle our board exam then and now. I tweaked some of it because I have ADD and am not on medication. It is hard!
Our school provided us the APEA but it felt like it was too shallow for me. I needed to understand so I attended a live course, Fitz. That tied down all the information and made me understand the whys and the how's on the exam. Some are straightforward recall but some will make you think and analyze the situation. I am not super smart but I know my weaknesses. I used that to my advantage. Repetition. Repetition. Repitition.
materials I used:
1. APEA. I got it from our school. I bought her Qs book too. I took a predictor exam yesterday and I got a 63%. Bummer! Too late to resched the exam.
2. Liek. I didn't read her book from cover to cover. I can't. Attention span and sitting still is an issue for me. But used it as reference on my weak areas. Quick browse.
3. Exam edge. I like answering Qs. Like my daily brain exercise. Not like the boards but I wanted variation of Qs.
4. Fitzgerald. I attended her lecture twice. Yes! Twice! I needed to be in a class so I would listen. I bought her CDs too online. She's boring like hell but she made more sense to me. I also bought her book. TMI for me but made me understand things better.
5. DRT Qs. I just took one so that I'd see different set of Qs and not get used to the wordings used in Liek and APEA.
6. AANP sample exam. Got an 86% the night before so I was like, hell yeah!
7. I prayed in the car with my husband. We read a passage together. When I was getting anxious in the middle of the test, I pray one Hail Mary. Prayers can move mountains.
It was an expensive and exhausting ride but all worth it. I was crying on my way out, on the elevator, on my way out to the car. I still am.
Hey guys! I too passed AANP FNP exam yesterday and found it to be fairly straight forward.
I want to share with you if what I used to study and some strategies to pass the exam. I bought Fitzgerald book, FNP Mastery Q bank app, Barkley CDs, Leik's Review book from Amazon and attended her web live course. I also did AANP practice exam for $50. I also did AANC exam. That one is free.
I really studied for about a month putting in about 6-8 hours a day. I originally studied Fitzgerald book but I really did not like the format. It's just so long and drawn out and the font was small and clumped together.
So I switched to Leik's book. I know that some information was out of date, but boy does it have a great format. I also listened to Barkley CDs and look through the charts in his booklet. When I commute (4hours each way every two weeks), he helped the make my driving more meaningful. He is an entertaining speaker, it doesn't add too much to Leik's book except Peds section (8 hours of it), but it makes it entertaining and its therefore easier to remember the material. Like what do you do when your patient missed a day, two days or three days of combo pills. He said "if they miss 3 pills in a row, you tell them to buy a crib" (the answer is to discard the rest of the pack and use protection until next cycle), but you will Never forget it again. There are a few times I sprayed my coke over my steering wheel burst out laughing. Humor always works for me. Just wait till he get to STD and Men's Health chapter. It's like Comedy Central. The peds section of the CDs are extremely strong.
I mainly focused on Leik's book since she covers most number of diseases and I loved the format! A week before my exam, I attended her online live course since she gives updates on the outdated materials in her book. That pretty much covered all the bases.
While studying the Leik's book, I also bought Leik's question bank app (identical questions with rationale but on the phone), about 10 questions were scored wrong in the app, but the rationale explain the right answer so no need to panic. I like the app a lot since it divides questions up by systems. You can also chose to only do the questions you missed, or just go over all the questions over and over again. I kept on going back to my missed questions, till the point that my average new score reached 96%.
In addition, I also find FNP Mastery question bank (also an app $30 range I believe) very useful. It has probably 900 questions including about 300 non clinical questions (which I ignored since AANP only has 1-2 non clinical questions). It is a good app since it gives you comprehensive rationale, tables and photos. I highly recommend this one. It gives you the score of each question right away as well as rationales, and ask you to rate it with Red (I don't know this question), Yellow (I know a little bit of the question) or Green (I am comfortable with this question). It doesn't give you a score at the end, but you can see how you did with the colored bar graph. I then went back to the Red questions only, then the Yellow ones until I turned most of them green eventually. It also allow you to select questions by system. I definitely recommend doing them system by system after you review Leik's book chapter by chapter. You can then go back to focus on the red and yellow questions. I am a breastfeeding mom with a marathon feeding baby, when the baby fed, I was on my phone turning colors on my question bank :-)
Leik's online review course was 4 days long. She also send you a booklet in just outline format. It's really the most important things to review. She covers probably half of her book content since there is just so much in her book. She is relaxed and funny. But for me, since it was just a week before my exam, I felt that I already knew most of them. It was more of cuddle up on the coach with tea and streamlining my brain kind of thing. It was nice. I turned off the speaker when she was answering question and just focused on the area I needed to strengthen, and turned more Red bars to Green. I bought tons of page stickers, and first had a lot of stickers on my book, as I read through the book again, I eventually only had a handful left and I only focused on those in my exam day.
The night before my exam, I paid $50 to take AANP 75 question retired exam. Mainly this is because I want to be familiar with the test format. It turned out that the format is identical to the actual exam. I scored 88% and finished it in about 45 minutes. I also took ANCC exam and scored 82% mainly because I didn't study much of the non clinical portion since I didn't plan to take ANCC.
I recommend spending that $50 for the AANP exam. The same format made me very relaxed at the exam. The level of difficulty is most similar to Leik's book questions.
If if you just stick faithfully to Leik's book and online review booklet, I bet you will score in the 90% range. It's that good :-)
One more thing, do ask for the ear plug since the exam room is big (at least for Chicago), and there is always someone coming in and leaving for bathroom runs, adjusting their chairs, there was a lady just across the aisle from me was hacking her poor lungs out during the entire 3 hours.
Also try to adjust your screen brightness before you put in the code to start the exam. Mine was so bright, I had a very hard time reading it. Before you put in the assigned code for AANP, the clock doesn't start to tick yet.
Also plot out the bathroom route to reduce stress. I arrived 1 hour ahead so I could do all that. There is always a coat rack and you are assigned a locker. I suggest to put your drink in your coat pocket so you don't have to wate time to get to your locker. I had to stop and drink half a bottle of coke I stuffed in my coat pocket to wake myself up. i took a bathroom run in the same trip and only knocked off 4 minutes of my time.
Took the exam yesterday and passed and honestly you could never be prepared enough. I read Leik cover to cover and answered all the questions in the back with their rationales. I also used APEA qbank. Some questions on the exam were straightforward like those on APEA. I purchased boardvitals which was good but it was too lengthy so I took a break. I used Bates and YouTube as resources . A week to the exam I did the AANP practice and scored 75% . A day to the exam I did APEA 150 questions and scored 87%.Took me over all about 2 months( system by system review- better be safe than sorry) plus working full time to study.
To rank the resources
1- Leik
2- Apea
Bates and YouTube things you are unsure of, review rationales on missed questions and keep doing practice questions. Good luck
I just took the AANP FNP and the ANCC FNP exam and passed both. The AANP exam is a very straightforward entry level exam. The test questions are just like the ones on the PSI site where you register to take the exam. Out of 150 questions, I marked 2 that I was unsure of. The exam I thought was much easier than the NCLEX for the RN. The ANCC test was different as I had numerous questions on Medicaid, Medicare, HIPAA, ethical questions, Hospice, and various research studies. Also, on the ANCC I had questions on which drug would be the most cost effective to prescribe for a certain diagnosis, which they do not teach in the review courses. I took both Hollier's and Fitzgerald's review courses. Good luck to everyone out there preparing for the exams, and if you have any questions just let me know and I will be gladly to offer you more information.
Hello,
Congrats on passing. I am preparing for ANCC exam.
Currently doing Fitzgerald online review, boardvitals questions and Leik book. I will greatly appreciate any Suggestions/advice/study tips to help me be successful on the ANCC exam.
FNPinNY
51 Posts
OK, so I took the AANC exam this week and passed. It was my first attempt at passing either exam. My plan was to take the AANC as practice to see where I stood and to take the AANP after strengthening my weak areas, and hopefully passing. Let me give you a little background and maybe it will help some of you. I graduated from my FNP program in May 2012. I was working in an area where certification was not necessary and I kept putting it off. Not the smartest thing any of us can do, but where would any of us be without a couple of really good rationalizations in our lives? I am north of 50 years old and I hope that is helpful for some of my colleagues considering this path.
The exam. I cannot tell you anything that has not already been posted on several of the exam blogs here.. It has all been covered. What I can tell you is be careful with practice questions. I looked up the correct information on peer reviewed sites like UpToDate. I found a many arbitrary or flat our wrong answers in the 600+ questions in the back of the Leik 2nd Ed as well as Fitzgerald's 4th. I still highly recommend both, but verify the information. Do not take any source as correct if you think it might be incorrect, look it up. I took Fitzgerald's course upon graduating because it was required in my program in 2009. She is very knowledgeable and some really good information (more geared toward practice than passing). I did not like her course because every topic and ever sentence began with I, In my practice, etc. There is so much wasted time on what she picked up, what she did. It might be OK for others, but with my ADD I found it distracting. Three years ago I was able to take Barkley as CE's paid for by my job. I believe they all are about equal and they did not really reflect the exam, at least the ANCC.
What I found valuable was questions, lots of questions and looking up the correct answers if I got them wrong. I also found Paul Bolin's CRASH videos invaluable. (crash usmle step 2 and 3 paul bolin - Youtube)
Lastly, there was a lot of leadership, management, nursing theory. My program was big on leadership and management and a lot came back enough for a good educated guess. There are very few knowledge based questions, they are mostly analysis, application and synthesis questions.
How I approached the questions. I crossed out the two distracters immediately (most of the time they were obvious). If I knew the answer (or was pretty sure) I selected my answer and moved on. On the questions I was queasy on I marked them for review. On the questions I did not know, I kept comparing the 2 answers left with the stem (past/present/future tense, etc) and finally went with my gut (first instinct). I guess what I'm saying is work the question and not the content when you do not know the answer and give your best guess.
So take a review course, use one or more of the books recommended on this blog, and search out the correct rational on our own. Paul Bolin gives a complete medical review online for free and you can access as much or as little as you need. Lastly, Lots and lots of questions. Search out allnurses for the best places for exam questions. The best resource I found was the FNP Exam Blogs on Allnurses. Thank all of you who have posted here for the confidence to take the exam and the excellent study advice. Good luck to all. If I can pass so can you.