Hello all,
I'm writing this to hopefully help anyone out that needs it. I took the TEAS 6 yesterday after studying all summer. I studied on average 3-4 hours per day for the 4 weeks leading up to the test. Prior to those four weeks, I put in about 1-2 hours per day the month prior to that. While my score (88.7 overall) is considered advanced, it falls short of my goal, and unfortunately, is also too low to be competitive in one of my top choice programs. Needless to say, I was disappointed.
I spent a small fortune on resources, manuals, and practice exams. I also asked anyone and everyone how the test went, what they did to study, and what they wished they did differently. I watched countless videos on YouTube of people summing up their experiences. I made lists of every single topic they mentioned and learned ALL of them like the back of my hand.
Because science is the monster to be defeated on this test, I'm going to start there. This was my worst subject on the test, and I was NOT prepared for how it really was.
Every single video I watched, every single book, manual, and resource focused on body systems. I studied, and studied, and studied body systems. I had been advised that the science would cover a lot of A&P with particular focus on testing you heavily and with detail on one system, so be prepared because you don't know what you were going to get. I was ready for that, and that is not what happened at all. For example, I got one extremely simple question on endocrine. That was it for that system. I could have answered it without having ever memorized a single hormone, where it originates, where it targets, or its effect. I got one tiny question on digestion. Again, extremely basic. No questions on enzymes, the macromolecules they digest, nothing on the anatomy of the GI tract. I was not asked about the blood flow through the heart. I got a couple, maybe 2, on nervous and some integumentary and immune, one on renal, one on male reproductive. None of them in great detail, at least not anywhere near the detail I was prepared to give. Overall, I got 78.7% in science. I realize this is not a terrible score, but when you are in the position I am in, trying to compete for a spot where the nursing schools are SO impacted, it's disappointing. Especially when all the knowledge you acquired after so many hours of studying wasn't put to use.
All this goes to say, knowing the body systems is not enough. (There are other versions of the test that this may not be the case with. Just know there are versions, like mine, that are.)
Here are a few things that were on the test that I was not prepared for, but had I known about, could have been:
Determining atomic radius WITHOUT a periodic table to consult. We all the learned to follow the arrows across a period and down a column to compare atomic radius. But if you didn't have a table to look at, are you prepared to answer that? I wasn't! And for what it's worth, the ones I was asked on were not any of the common ions you could determine their column by knowing their fixed ionic charge.
pH. I got several questions on determining pH but the calculator you have will not have log functions and if you are like me, only ever solved these with a calculator and did not review this topic.
I got several where they explained an experiment, the outcomes, and you had to determine what the hypothesis most likely was.
There was a lot of micro. I haven't yet taken micro, so I can't sum this up well. I was prepared with knowing prokartyote vs eukaryote, but there was more than that. I wish I could explain this better, but I don't know what I don't know, if that makes sense. What I do know is out of the dozens of practice exams I had taken while studying, very very few questions were micro and any that did come up, I studied those topics.
I took both of the ATI practice exams A and B. I took them under test like conditions, only taking bathroom breaks between subjects. Otherwise, with a timer, not using notes, etc. I got 100% on the science section of practice test B the first time I took it. My highest scores on A and B were 94% and 94.7%. All I can say is that the science was not like the practice tests. It was just so much more random and much broader than the A&P I was prepared for. None of the manuals I bought cover the science like this, IMO.
Moving on. Math. I actually got 100 on math! The ATI practice exams are a good practice for this. Nothing on the real test was harder than the practice exams, in fact, it might have been a bit easier. I really was just basic algebra. I also recommend BrandonCraftMath .com or his youtube channels. If you can do his practice exam he built, you are prepared.
Reading, I got 91.5. I had heard from many people that time was an issue for reading. I did not find this to be a problem. I mentioned above, I took a lot of practice exams under test like conditions. If speed is your issue, keep doing this, time yourself, and repeat. It was very, very similar to the ATI practice exams in both similarity of questions and length of passages.
Lastly, English and language usage. I got 83.3. I know I could have done better than this but... I was so flustered after the science. At the testing facility I was at, we were not allowed any breaks. This was terrible. I withheld water before the test because I was afraid of needing to go the bathroom and not being allowed back in the room. I was feeling dizzy and dehydrated. I really, really, would have benefited from a break before beginning ELU. Each facility sets its own rules, so be aware of them and if you can, take the test somewhere you can have water and stretch your legs!
That being said, my favorite resource for ELU was Khan academy. I took all the quizzes and watched all the videos on grammar. The real teas was also quite similar to the practice exams. What everyone before me has said is true: subject verb agreement, punctuation, caplitalization, commonly mispelled words, etc. You should study these even if you think you know it. It's very particular even if english is your first language and the questions are never simple examples. For example, the subject verb agreement will not be, "She likes cookies" vs "She like cookies" It'll be choosing the right verb agreement for subjects that are difficult to determine if they are plural or not (ex: half of the team, part of the city, etc) or plural and singular subjects connected with a conjuntion. Something along the lines of, "The girls or the boy like the cookies" vs "The girls or the boy likes the cookies."
Anyways, good luck to you all! If you have any questions, I'd like to help if I can.
Etak, BSN, RN
135 Posts
@Jiangjane I felt overall, the reading was very comparable to practice exam A and B. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve taken either practice exam, so I can’t say I remember specifically which was more similar. However, I felt that both length of passages and difficulty of questions was very similar in the practice tests and real test. There were no surprises, even though I didn’t get 100 on reading, there was nothing in the reading that took me by surprise. I think the best way to prepare for the sort of material you’ll see in the reading is by doing test A and B and also the practice tests in the back of the yellow Mometrix book.
Make sure you know about primary, secondary, tertiary sources. Also, how to follow directions on a recipe, be able to tell if a passage is narrative, expository, technical, analytical, persuasive. Be comfortable being able to read information on a flyer or advertisement. There’s also reading and interpreting a few graphs. Also following a set of step by step directions. I think there were very good example problems of all of these things in the practice tests available.
The most difficult part of the reading are the questions that will ask you to infer the answer. Go over what it means to infer and practice that. All the other things I listed above are easy points because there will be cues that give the right answer and you won’t have to reason your way to the right answer. Make sure you know those things, they’ll be the easiest points to score.