NCLEX is in a few days and my scores are dropping. Help!

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Hi everyone! I've been a long time lurker, but decided to finally make an account because I'm always on here looking up advice anyway and this forum saved me when I was in nursing school :)

I partially need to vent and I would also like some advice if you have any. I'm wondering if anyone has ever experienced this because I'm starting to get pretty nervous.

I graduated August 12, 2017. I got my ATT a few weeks later and scheduled my exam for this Thursday, September 7. I was a fairly decent student in nursing school, but it didn't come easy for me. I was mostly a B student, but I also got several As and Cs throughout my program and I worked very hard. I have pretty difficult test anxiety that I've always struggled with, but I've tried hard to find things that work for me and powered through.

My school did ATI, and on my ATI exit exam I got a 97% chance of passing which I felt great about. Part of me didn't want to study for the NCLEX, but I knew if I didn't study and ended up failing, I'd never be able to forgive myself! And I didn't want to get cocky or be one of those people who felt above studying. So I enrolled in Kaplan to learn strategies, and I also do U World in addition to Kaplan because I like the rationales.

My problem is... the more I seem to study and review, my scores are actually dropping! I completed the Kaplan review several weeks ago, and since then I try to do 75-150 questions total a day using both Kaplan and U World, but I have increased the amount of daily questions since last week. I did very well at first on my qbanks, but the more I do, the more I seem to be making silly mistakes and getting confused. At first I was scoring in the 60s-70s on my practice tests which I felt okay about, but now I'm getting 40s-60s and my U World average has dropped several points to 56%- I don't understand why this is happening. Is this normal???

My test is in a few days and I don't know if I should keep studying and doing questions while I power through not overthinking my scores, just focus on lightly reviewing what I need to work on, or just stopping all together. Or maybe I should just push my test date back a few weeks?

I feel like there's something wrong with me because I should be improving on my scores or at least staying the same... not dropping. I think I'm causing myself a lot of anxiety and dwelling on my scores too much, and maybe I just tried to cram and overdo it and I'm getting burnt out. I don't know.

Sorry this was so long. Thank you for taking the time to read this!

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Specializes in Med/surg/ortho.

I think what u need right now is to stop. You know what u know at this point.

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i guess it is time to rest. good luck on your exam. share with us the good news!

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Thank you both for the input!!! I am going to rest for now and maybe lightly brush up on some things tomorrow if I feel up to it. :) I'm trying very hard to be in a good positive mindset for the exam, it's more difficult than I thought!! I will update and let y'all know how it goes :)

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Very delayed update: I passed in 75 questions!

The NCLEX honestly wasn't as hard and scary as I thought.... And this is coming from someone who wasn't a great student and struggled in nursing school. I felt like Kaplan helped prepare me for the actual test and gave me strategies, and the Uworld practice questions helped me tons! I actually had several questions on the NCLEX that were identical to Uworld.

Also, the PV trick worked for me as of September 8th (I promised myself I wouldn't do it, but after my test I couldn't stop myself) lol

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