How I passed NCLEX !!

[gansu]

I took my test last Thursday and found out today that I passed. I had 75 questions and it was the hardest test I ever took thus far in my life. This is what I did and I feel it helped me a great deal.

Content is VERY IMPORTANT. We are expected to know content because we graduated from school. The problem is how much of content did we really learn in nursing school. Some schools give out study guides before the exam and the focus is on getting good grades in the exam not necessarily learning EVERYTHING there is to learn in those big fat nursing textbooks. But for the the NCLEX it is impossible to predict what are commonly tested content areas, so in short - know everything. Sounds impossible but that should be the goal so at least most of it will be covered.

Saunders is a good review book- certainly more indepth content than Kaplan and as good as Reviews and Rationales. I strongly recommend going back to your nursing textbook if there is something you left out while you were in school.

I subscribed to Suzanne's plan and I have the greatest admiration for her and for the time and effort she puts in to help those of us who are clueless. But I feel that doing Saunder's alone is taking a big risk. I am not arguing her statistics nor the effectiveness of only using Saunders. I did every single one of those questions because our school used Saunders and ATI as NCLEX material. But I also did Lippincott, Davis, reviews and rationales, and Kaplan. I doubt I would have passed if I had done Saunders alone.

So to summarise - KNOW your content ( everything there is to know). Even if it feels overwhelming because you cannot tell where the questions will come from. Try many different sources of questions to broaden your way of thinking. You will find that as you do all these questions from different sources the way you think through a question will become more automatic and you will develop your critical thinking skills. It will become second nature to eliminate wrong choices and think through the plausible ones.

My exam was by no means an easy one, but I felt I passed at 75 questions because I focussed on mastering my content and I did many many questions from different resources to broaden the way I approached a question.

Hope this helps, good luck to all who are waiting to take the test or for results. It was the hardest 48 hours of my life.

[bee2160]

congrats! i'm using saunder's only for my review.. i don't have enough time to review other materials.. anyway, i'm still hoping i'll pass the exam.. thanks for the post. :)