ANCC Passed

I, much like the rest of future nurse practitioners cruised these boards daily trying to gather as much information as I could about certification. However, as my test date neared, I quit reading the negative posts, it made me worry way too much.

ANCC Passed

I am proud to say that I took the ANCC exam today and passed!! Hallelujah, it's over!

I promised myself I would come back and share my experience on the site I viewed so many times. However, I feel I must share a little bit of my backstory. I've been a nurse for 6 years. Had experience in pretty much every department within my hospital except OB. Secondly, I have a 3.5 GPA which includes an associates degree in business management, as well as my nursing degrees. I was by far not a straight A, kill myself to get straight A's kind of guy. However, I am pretty proud of my GPA, but did take some time to have a little bit of a life. I also have 3 children 11, 3, and 16 months, so life was hectic. I also worked full time, 3 twelve hour shifts per week. Anyways, my point is, I did what I could with the time that I had, and didn't spend hours upon hours studying while in school.

Now that's out of the way, I graduated August 12th and tested September 6th. Unless you did not retain any content that you learned in school, I feel studying for months is not the best option. You can't retain every piece of information that you come across, so why try?

I did have a plan to pick only 1-2 resources to utilize for studying. Believe it or not, some authors will deviate a little on treatment options, etc which fit what they personally do. Not that this is right or wrong, but if you get two authors whose information varies somewhat, it can throw your brain for a loop and make it harder to retain the content, I feel. With that being said, being maxed out on funds by school, tests, license, etc. I only bought the Liek book. My plan was to study Leik daily for 3-4 weeks and test. I wanted to read through the book, highlighting important information, and then go through again and make note cards. However, that didn't happen, procrastination, responsibilities, life, for in the way. I did also purchase Leiks app and competed all the questions before studying, averaging around a 70%

I did manage to get about 3/4ths of the book read, and started to focus on things I thought were important towards the end. Needless to say, I scheduled my AANP exam for Sept 11th. My parents wanted to do something nice for me for graduation, so I asked them to pay for the ANCC exam, and they agreed. I mainly scheduled both because I have a job lined up, my wife is going to stay home when I start my new job, and I wanted to use my first tests as a trial run if I failed. Both were fairly quick to authorize me to test, and both allowed me to sit prior to having official transcripts.

Anyways, I received authorization to test from the ANCC and decided to just go for it. Scheduled it for about 6 days after I got authorization. I continued in Leik but realized I wouldn't get through it all. About 3-4 days before I tested, a friend let me borrow Hollier's APEA review CD's. I decided to abandon the rest of Leik and listen to as many of the CD's I could taking notes on every topic. This was very valuable. Leik was also a great source, I just didn't give myself enough time to work through it. Her app is worth the 20$ and is the same questions as in the back of the book. Yes there are errors, and JNC guidelines need updated, but if you have to look it up, it helps to make you retain it.

So, I basically studied hard for roughly 2 weeks. And by hard I mean 1-2 hours in Leik and 1-2 cds per day with Hollier.

Needless to say, I would recommend a month of studying with 2 resources. A friend gave me Fitzgerald's review book from her live course, and i felt it went a little too deep for my liking, so I quickly abandoned it. But the most important tip I can give you is not to kill yourself trying to study every resource and know every piece of information about every disease and their treatments, it's just too much. Plus, the ANCC exam had maybe 5-10% recall information. The rest was critical thinking and "here's your patient scenarios". Even the majority of non clinical questions required working through the problem. Sorry for the long post, but after reading posts of "I studied for 6 months" and "I studied 15 resources", I was terrified. I honestly wanted to encourage future test takers to pick 1-2 resources and give them an honest effort. If you want to read but know you'll be distracted by something and unable to really concentrate, the. Save it for the next day! Don't kill yourself!

Lastly, believe in yourself, be confident, and rock that thing out! If an average to above average student who worked full time, has 3 kids, and a fairly busy social life can he tit done in one shot, you can too! Sorry for the long post but I wanted to give an honest opinion and maybe help those who are looking for a post that didn't say I study for 12 years, I bought every resource, or i failed it 14 times. The test is tough, as it should be, but definitely manageable. A little side note, I did not mark any questions, and I did not review any questions. I made sure I read the question thoroughly, understood what they were asking, and chose what I thought was the best answer. Feel free to reach out to me if I can be of any help to any of you. I'm typically on here every 2-3 days or so.

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WVFNP

About WVFNP, MSN, APRN

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Specializes in Neurology, Psychology, Family medicine.

Good job :).

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