med surg final

kristandrews · Apr 8, 2011

You may just need to try different study styles until you see what fits you best. I imagine it'll take a combination of strategies, but you'll eventually figure out what works for you individually! Things I've seen that work for various people include:

Reading every word of every page of the textbook until you know it inside and out

Skimming the pages, trying to understand the overall idea of what you're reading

Hand-writing note cards with all of the important material covered on the test (you focus on it as you write it and then use the note cards to review for the test)

Typing (or maybe hand-writing) the notes from class into a study guide (if you make a study guide, be sure to share it with your classmates... it may help them, too!)

Outlining the chapters.

Taking a tape recorder to class and then listening to the lectures again later on (one person I know takes her time listening to the recorded lecture, pausing it to jot down notes and rewinding to listen to important points. another person i know records the lecture, and during class they write down the times when the teacher said something important (5 minutes into the lecture, 6:22 into the lecture, etc) and then they go back and re-listen to the portions of the lecture that were important to remember)

Doing tons and tons of practice questions before the test (from NCLEX review books, the textbook's website, practice CD in the book, mynursinglab, evolve, etc)

Going over the material with a study group, and asking about anything that confused you while you were studying. It may help you to teach them things they don't understand, too!

Listening to study guides. I learn best by listening, so I've used a text-to-speech converter on the internet to convert my study guides into audio. Now I have an amazon kindle and i listen to some of my textbooks and study guides on it instead.

Talking to your teacher one-on-one about the exam, Some teachers give advice about how to study for their own exams if you ask them in their office!

Make sure that you understand the material and don't just know it. In my experience, nursing questions make you apply the knowledge to situations, so you've gotta make sure you truly understand what's going on with a disease process to answer all of the questions about it.

I know a lot of these ideas probably aren't applicable to a final, but maybe there are some you can use now, and others that you can use next semester!

Good luck on your final! And congrats on making it this far!!!

ckh23, BSN, RN · Apr 9, 2011

I always found study groups helpful because you can bounce different things off of each other. I always found at least a couple of test questions that I learned in a study group that I would have not known on my own.