I was wondering if anyone took both Kaplan and Hurst.

TheCommuter, BSN, RN · Apr 28, 2011

I took both Kaplan and Hurst during the early part of last year. My school paid for Kaplan to come to the class and conduct a live review, and we also had access to the online question bank. I personally paid for the live Hurst review with a friend of mine.

In a nutshell, here is the main difference. Kaplan is a strategies review, whereas Hurst is a content review. If you attended a school with a quality nursing program that taught you thoroughly about basic nursing content, then Kaplan's strategies for answering higher level questions will be helpful to you (especially their Decision Tree method). However, I attended a nursing program with a very low first-time NCLEX pass rate, and the school had lackluster instructors who skipped important content, so the Hurst review came to my rescue because it reinforced what I knew and introduced me to content that I had never even learned.

I passed NCLEX on my first attempt with the minimum of 75 questions in about one hour, and I owe some of my success to the Hurst Review. However, my friend took both Kaplan and Hurst with me, and she failed NCLEX on her first attempt, but then again she's the type of person who has traditionally not performed too well with standardized testing in the past.

caliotter3 · May 1, 2011

If you can afford both, then you can take both, it can't hurt. Most people do not take a review course at all and are just fine passing the NCLEX.

kgh31386, BSN, MSN, RN · May 2, 2011

Like they said, some people don't really study and pass no problem...others can study months with 5 different reviews, and fail. I took Hurst because my job reimbursed me for it. I also stumbled across a Kaplan book..you'll find that every single different book will say something slightly different. Saunders will say do X first in a situation, Hurst will say do Y first, and Kaplan may not even mention X or Y and say that Z is the best thing and first choice.