I promise God that if I passed my NCLEX test that I will help as much nursing students as I can by sharing my story. I just want to start by giving you a background for the past year of my life to understand my anxiety on taking the NCLEX.
First, I failed my last class of acute care during the fall session and I was so devastated that I cried for a whole week. I felt so defeated not only by failing a class but it also mean that I wouldn't graduate with my whole nursing class which I have built rapport for the past two years. I was also angry because I have wasted hundreds of hours going to school, clinical, and studying instead of spending time with my daughter. To top it all off, I was having financial difficulty and also my marriage was unraveling . After 9 years of marriage my husband and I finally decided that separation and divorce was inevitable. I finally graduated on May 2013 and within couple of weeks I took the Hurst review. At the same time I was packing my life away to move to another state. I originally scheduled to take my test in July but knowing that your getting a divorce but your both still living together is very emotionally draining so I moved it back to the second week of August. My daughter and I moved across the country the first week of August and I cried the whole week and could not get out of bed so I moved it back to September 4, 2013 (My last available date) because I forgot about the three month rule and so now I only have two and half weeks to study and I literally wanted to shoot myself.
So the silver lining to this story is that even though people called the NCLEX test as the devil incarnate (because it knows your weakness..hehehe), it actually got me out of my funk and forced me to focused all my energy on me and my daughter's future. Here is my study plan to help anybody who is having panic attacks because they didn't have enough time to study.
Hurst: I read the whole book but I wasn't able to memorize any information. I focused mostly on my weaknesses which are pediatrics, maternity (I know, it's very ironic that these are my weakness), pharmacology and endocrine. I didn't get to do the questions because I needed to focus on the content. I know that everybody said to focused on questions but if you don't know your content you can answers a thousand questions and still not know the answer.
Kaplan: A very good friend of mine shared her Kaplan questions with me after she passed her NCLEX and I am so grateful and forever indebted to her because I feel like this helped me the most on preparing me for the test in combination of my content studies. I actually think that their questions are a lot harder than the NCLEX questions that I got.
Diagnostic 61%
QT1 49%
QT2 59%
QT3 47%
QT4 68%
QT5 67%
QT6 69%
QT7 Did not do
Readiness 67%
Saunders: I only did the SATA or alternate questions to prepare myself because I really suck at SATA questions.
I know that my scores are horrible but I persevered. I studied 2 hours during the day and 5 hours at night. I know that I'm a visual learner so I watched a lot of youtube videos on different diseases that I am very weak on and also the correct procedures on how to do things. I wrote a lot of notes with pictures on them as well. I memorize some of the mnemonics that I created and have found here. I trained myself for the long haul because I felt like I was going to take all 265 questions or be there for 6 hours so whenever I do questions, I always made sure that it's at least 150-250 a time without breaks beside bathroom breaks. I'm not a morning person but my test was at 8:00am so I woke up everyday for two weeks at 7:00am, shower, eat my breakfast and go straight to my studies. By the time it was time for me to take my test, I was a nervous wreck. I didn't want my anxiety to take over so I prayed to God, I closed my eyes and pretended that I'm doing my morning routine of answering questions in my study. One and a half hours later my computer shut off at 75 questions and I didn't know whether to cry or laugh. I paced myself the whole test and I actually took three breaks because I keep needing to go to the bathroom (I was actually flag for that and my test was audited so it took two days for me to find out that I passed.)
My most important advice is know your lab values because I had at least 10 questions with lab values in it and interpreting them on what type of disease would cause this abnormality or what lab value to look for in certain diseases and medications. READ ALL your rationales even if you get them right. Know your infection control because this will also help you in prioritization questions. PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE your SATA or alternate questions because you will have a lot of them. Focused really hard on the first 10-15 questions because these determines what level questions you will get (or so I heard). I had 5 SATA on the first 15 questions and then its every other questions.
I hope that my story will help someone out there and to let you know that you are not alone. Good Luck future nurses, I know that you can do it!
