Canada: I Passed the NCLEX-RN in 75 Questions 1st Try

Published Jan 3, 2017

22 Posts

This morning I found out that I passed my board exam!!!!!! I am so happy and relieved, but before I start celebrating I want to reach out to those of you who are still studying. The NCLEX is depicted to be one of the biggest hurdles in your nursing career. I'm going to lay out everything I did in order to prepare and help instil some confidence in those who have yet to write it.

My background: My previous degree is a BSc in Biological Sciences and Physical Sciences. I graduated from a nursing after degree program in August 2016. I took the rest of August and all of September off to give myself a break to recover from going through nursing school 2 years straight year round.

On October 1st, I decided to use the Saunder's NCLEX-RN Comprehensive Review book. I got through all of fundamentals. However, I realized that it was taking WAY TOO LONG to even get through a chapter. I was getting bored, easily distracted, and the information just wasn't sticking. It was SO DRY, and quite frankly, there was way too much excessive information. As a result, I decided that using a comprehensive review book was just not an adequate resource for me. I needed something that gave the CORE information in a condensed style.

On November 1st, I purchased the HURST Review. I printed out the fill-in-the-blank notes that were associated with each video. Every day I would watch 2 videos and thoroughly fill in the notes for those. This took roughly 2 weeks. Once I was done the videos, I studied my notes for 1 week making sure that I had memorized and learned from the notes. I had to make sure I knew the information like the back of my hand. THAT WAS THE CORE CONTENT. I really liked this review. They presented information in a style that helped it stick in my brain. It was entertaining, and each video was on average 50 minutes long.

After learning the information on the HURST review, I decided to do the HURST Q Review. Each Q Review was 125 questions, and I did 1/day. Let me tell you: I was not scoring the mean average they tell you to get (85/125). My scores were as follows: 63/125, 73/125, 81/125, 69/125, 79/125, 78/125. This CRUSHED my confidence. I read through the rationales. However, I felt like I needed more practice.

PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE = THE KEY TO PASSING THE NCLEX

The last resource that I used was the UWORLD question bank. This is an AMAZING question bank. UWORLD has the BEST rationales - they're so detailed and go through the whys and hows of each question. I finished the ENTIRE Q bank doing a minimum of 150 Qs each day. I would do 2 sets of 75 question tests in tutor mode and read the rationale for each of the questions I got wrong as I went through the exam. Sometimes I would write down the rationale summary in a scribbler that I would review the next day. My score at the end of the Q-Bank was around 67% average and 86th percentile rank. This gave me a confidence boost because you can tell where you stand in comparison to others. It also tells you what percent of people answers the question correctly for EACH question. The statistics they give you, really put your mind at ease. For example, if only 17% of users got a question right, I would feel that this is one of the harder questions and it's okay if I didn't get it right. If 78% of users got a question right, this would be a key fundamental question that I should be getting right. All in all, I highly recommend UWORLD to everyone!

The NCLEX: I wrote on Dec 16, 2016. The night before the NCLEX, I was a complete mess. My stomach was in knots. I could barely eat. I scarfed down a DQ cheeseburger meal to get a dense calorie rich food in my body. I was so NERVOUS. I briefly reread the HURST review notes and the UWORLD rationale notes I wrote in my scribbler. Decided to go to bed at 2am. My test was at 8am and I had to be up by 6:30am. However, every time I would put my head down on the pillow, I could hear my heart beating so fast and it taunted me all night. I tossed and turned - tried relocating to the couch, the spare bedroom, back to my bed.... let's just say I max slept an hour. In the morning, I showered to wake myself up, made a cup of coffee, ate an omelette, and went to the writing centre in downtown. The other TA was late so my exam didn't start till around 8:45AM. During that time, I chatted with some former classmates that were also writing. It helped calm my anxiety. After being palm veined scanned, I went into the writing room and was placed in front of the computer. I was done the exam in about 2 hours. It shut off at 75 questions. My first thought: "NOOOOO I can do better!!! Please don't shut off." I WALKED OUT THINKING I FAILED. TEARS WERE RUNNING DOWN MY FACE. About 40% of the exam was SATA questions. I felt like the questions I was getting throughout the exam were TOO EASY and not enough critical thinking. I was preparing myself using UWORLD and those questions were WAY HARDER than any question I got on the NCLEX. Distraught, thinking I failed, I went to my cousins house and cried for about 4 hours straight while sipping on a rye and coke. For about the next 3 days I moped around feeling ultra depressed. My results didn't come till about 2.5 weeks due to the holidays. I did not do the PVT - didn't want to give myself false impressions in case it was wrong. I decided to not dwell on it and chilled with my family and friends, making the most of the holidays.

Jan 3, 2017: I opened up that email to find that I passed!!!!! WOW I'm an RN. Thank you God.

So for anyone reading this, don't feel discouraged. There's always hope! And I realized that basically EVERYONE walks out of that exam feeling like they failed. So have faith. There's always light at the end of the tunnel!! BELIEVE IN YOURSELVES AND GOOD LUCK TO YOU ALL