Do you find Kaplan Tree useful?

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Hello, I have been doing bunch of qbank, qtrainer stuff for couple days and I take NCLEX on the 18th. I personally find that the Tree is actually messing me up even more, scores on qbank and trainer seem to come out little less than when I trust my own judgement.

With all honesty, I think the Tree is piece of ****, lol but I wanted to know if I was doing something wrong or that other people find it less useful also.

In my opinion, the Kaplan decision tree is an interesting attempt to "standardize" a student's approach to test questions. The obvious advantage is that this creates a practiced and consistent method which can overcome the high levels of performance-impairing stress and anxiety many students feel when they take the real deal. When your mind blanks on question 1 of the NCLEX, it's definitely nice to have an auto-pilot decision tree to fall back on.

The disadvantage is that many nursing programs go to great lengths to train students to be flexible critical thinkers who don't rely overmuch on any rote methods ("Don't just know how, know WHY!" is what I was always told) and the decision tree is a relatively rigid thought process.

This is the main reason why I discarded the decision tree entirely when preparing for the NCLEX; using the decision tree to answer practice questions felt very artificial, like I wasn't really using any nursing judgement or assessment skills but was instead relying on pattern-recognition (assessments vs implementations, Maslow's, ABC's) to weed out the winning answer. It really felt like I was just being taught how to game the system to get a passing score instead of just focusing on improving my base of nursing skills and knowledge. I personally felt more comfortable critically thinking through each question, and pretending I was actually in the scenario being described in order to find the correct answer.

Also, while Kaplan claims use of the decision tree will boost scores, I scored in the 60's-70's with the tree on question trainer tests and in the 70's-90's without the tree on question trainer tests, so I definitely wouldn't put blind faith into that claim. I'm sure the decision tree is a guiding light to certain nursing students, but it didn't do anything for me. I, and others in this thread, passed the NCLEX in 75 questions without the decision tree, so obviously it's not required to pass the NCLEX either.

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had to like your post, you have said pretty much what I wanted to say

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