Failed My First Nursing Foundations Exam :(

I'm sorry. My first two exams are next week, I've spent so many hours studying I'm about to go ga-ga. I am only praying it's enough. They say that it's the style of the tests that trips us up, so I am trying hard to understand concepts. Don't give up after just one test....

If you haven't done already, go thru the exam with your instructor to find out where you went wrong. Then much like the nursing process, you have got to evaluate your previous study habits. Assess whether you put in enough study time. Include practising NCLEX-style questions part of your study; if you do not already have one, buy an NCLEX-style book for fundamentals. When you do the questions, read all the rationales whether you got the answer right or wrong. I find that rationales contain rich information that sometimes we skim thru in the text book. Practice lots of questions and in due time you will start to get a hang on how the questions are being asked/formatted. Also, there are tips to answering questions; think safety, ABC's and maslow's hierarchy. If an answer choice contains an absolute such as "all" or "never" chances are good that the answer is wrong. If even one word is wrong in an answer choice and the rest of it feels right, the whole answer choice is wrong. Well, that's all I can come up with right now. Do not give up, keep on

Failing an exam is never easy. Take a deep breath and try not to get too down on yourself. I would suggest meeting with your instructor to go over the exam and to get some info on how to improve in the future. You may also want to purchase a book on test taking strategies. I don't have any recommendations off the top of my head, but your school should have some recommended ones. Figure out what went wrong and make changes to your studying. And it's WAY too early in the game to think about quitting. There will be many more challenges as you go forward in your program. Don't let one bad test score discourage you. And you said it yourself, God didn't bring you this far to see you fail.