6-28-2016: Nclex - passed

[withersp]

Hi everyone! I just thought I'd be one more person to share their story, it's kind of long. Reading everyone else's stories before my test and while waiting for my results kind of gave me something to do and pass the time since getting NCLEX off the brain was never possible while doing any other activity. So I hope reading this will help people like me. I'll tell you all about my process of studying and then how the test went.

So I'll start with how I am as a general student. All throughout nursing school I really felt like other people struggled a lot more than I did to pass classes, so I wasn't nervous my entire senior year about the NCLEX. My main stress was focused on passing my last nursing class due to my severe senior-itis....But once I passed the class and knew I was graduating, I can't say that I was particularly freaking out about the NCLEX. Our school made us attend a mandatory NCLEX review with Don Anderson for 5 days. I would really love to say that the review helped me but the thing is...I graduated May 20th and our review started at 7am May 21st. So, needless to say I was exhausted from everything that the last 3 weeks of senior year hit me with and I didn't get even one day to recuperate before sitting for 8 hours listening to someone lecture me on stuff we've learned for 4 years.

I'm going to tell you I have no clue what my learning style is, it's a little bit of everything according to some of those online tests, but lecturing has never worked for me. Since sophomore year in college all we had were 3-4 hour nursing classes, and I always stopped listening after about 15 minutes of the lecture. So you can imagine how torturous this don anderson review session was for me....40 hours of lecturing in a 7 day period. I did well on the first day of med surg info, then after that it all kind of went downhill. Either I was just staring off into space or I was asleep. It made me a little more nervous about the NCLEX because all I kept thinking was...."How am I supposed to take the NCLEX when I can't even review adequately????" All the review did was make me realize how much I really needed to review my own way.

They tell you not to change your study habits so I had planned to study for a couple days and then just take the test right after graduating before I lost all the knowledge. Unfortunately the boards changed up on their document requirements last minute and no one from my college got their ATT until around the middle of June so that kind of threw a wrench in my whole plan to take the test immediately.

After the review, I literally threw that book in my closet and didn't open it again until the day before my test...for about an hour just skimming the 300 pages. So for about 2.5 weeks I was not studying, I was watching movies and going out, just living life. I knew this would happen, because I knew that if I didn't have a date to work towards, I wasn't going to just study with no end in site. I don't study that way. I finally got my ATT like June 17th or something, I almost picked to take my test on the 20th but then I just got super scared because I didn't feel prepared at all. I mean almost 3 weeks of forgetting information....pffft there was no way. So I picked June 28th instead, and I found UWorld like maybe the week before I got my att.

I had bought the Saunders NCLEX prep book online for super cheap and it came with their database of questions on evolve. I did the 75 question assessment test when I first bought it at the end of April and then I didn't really get much further than that. I really hated the layout and it distracted me from the questions. I also thought their explanations were over simplified and didn't give me a deeper understanding of why I got some questions wrong. I got a 69% on that test in April so I didn't think that was too bad, but then I still felt like I just wasn't being prepared enough. So I went searching for alternative NCLEX prep, everyone claims that their products help you pass on the first try but from what I've learned....EVERYONE is different, we all learn different and our NCLEX will be unique to OUR knowledge. It's impossible to say that one product works 100% but you can get a good feel of whether or not a product has a higher chance of helping you pass than others. So far what I saw as being effective for people were Saunders, Kaplan and NCSBN questions...and with some extra research, by some miracle, I found UWorld. This was the only site that I have never heard of before so it automatically intrigued me. In case you haven't figured it out by now, I really like to do things my own way. Since everyone around me was using Saunders, Kaplan, ATI and Hesi I just felt like UWorld might have something the others couldn't offer. I was correct.

I never liked Kaplan, I think they have a lazy way of doing things, sure they teach you how to take the test but they don't teach you the knowledge you need to take it. Their format is clunky and oversimplified if you ask me.

Saunders is really popular with people, I thought that if I would have had the patience and motivation to read all their chapters then I could have been prepared for the NCLEX. But the way my study habits are set up.....lol. That failed me completely, and then their question database was, like I already mentioned before, clunky and oversimplified like Kaplan. I don't know, I just got really antsy while trying to focus on this dark purple screen answering questions in big letters...the layout was terrible for me :\:

My school forced me to do ATI questions and then we had to take the exit ATI proctored exam in order to pass the class. I got a 69% on that too I think, which said that I has an 86% predictability of passing the test on the first try. I didn't study for that test though, I did all the questions I was required to do within like a week (I was assigned to do them since the beginning of the semester). It was 150 questions, and it kind of had the same format as the NCLEX if you ask me. But after the first 50 I was tired of answering questions....I started picking things just because I wanted the test to hurry up and be over with. ATI questions in my opinion were only fact based, there were no critical thinking questions. Then I also found myself picking answers and getting them right only because they would repeat questions and I had a knack for remembering answers to questions I got wrong. I didn't feel like my understanding was improving at all.

I never tried HESI personally, but I thought about it.

So the week before I picked my date I probably did maybe like 25-50 questions a day on UWorld and I got to 50 only if it was a very productive day. But I LOVED UWorld questions, from the very first question I answered I felt like it challenged me on knowledge as well as critical thinking. Let me tell you....I was clueless before UWorld. Their rationales make SO much sense to me and they're so thorough that I could answer any question that had the same topic even if it was worded differently or I could use knowledge from past rationales to rule out certain answers in questions that had different topics! This was priceless for me, and no other question database could provide this for me.

I started out by only doing unanswered questions of a specific system that I knew always gave me a hard time. For instance, my weak areas were cardiac, pediatrics, and maternity. So I did all maternity questions at one time, then all pediatrics then all cardiac. After that, I felt my knowledge was good enough to do 75 questions of all systems. The week before my test I amped up my questions to at least 150 a day for about 3-4 days. Then I amped it up even more and did at least 220 questions, my goal was 300 but I never could answer 300 questions in a day. I'd also like to mention, that just for kicks and giggles I did the Saunders 75 question assessment test again after some UWorld questions and my average went up to 76% which just proved that UWorld was effective. I answered a total of about 1700 questions and my overall score was 55% on UWorld.

Now the day of my test, I made sure to only bring my passport, phone and keys. I had to take public transportation there since there was no parking. I was definitely worried for the whole week leading up to the test but I was also getting so good at answering questions and recalling information that I never bothered to remember in the whole 4 years. UWorld made me wonder why some things never stuck with me in the past before. So this made me feel a little less nervous, based off of how much I had improved in just one week, it made me realize that I was not in any way ready to take my test right after graduation.

I answered all 265 questions, and honestly the whole time I was taking the test, I only felt physically nervous once and that was when the test blinked and asked if I wanted to take a break. That was the moment I realized I was probably going to answer all the questions, and it was also when I mentally freaked myself out momentarily by thinking that I was stupid since it didn't shut off at 75 for me. No matter how many rumors you read that 265 doesn't mean you failed...doesn't actually help. But anyway, I teared up a little, then just kept it going. In the back of my mind I was thinking about what I'd do if I failed but tried to not let that affect how I was answering. They say that the more SATA questions you get, the better you do. I don't think that's necessarily true. For 48 hours after the test I went through waves of despair and depression because I thought I failed since the test was too easy. I had maybe only 15 SATA out of 265 questions, and most questions were just not high level in my opinion. People who pass are usually like "The test was so hard, I had to guess on everything" "There were things I never even heard of on the test"....but for me, almost every question was just like "I know I SHOULD know this answer..." there were only a couple that really had me confused, and I honestly think those might have just been the 15 test questions that don't count towards your score. Anyway, my test was at 1:30 and I ended up leaving at like 3:40 ish.

My test was on hold for the first 24 hours which I found out by doing the Pearson vue trick that everyone mentions. I put in an expired debit card and put in all the accurate card info and hit submit on the order. It didn't give me a good or bad popup, it just said "test is on hold, you can't register" basically. So I freaked out even more and cried my eyes out some more since I had no idea of if I passed or not and my thoughts always go to the worst possibility. Then at like 1am on the day of when I would be able to get my quick results, I did the PVT again and the status changed from test is on hold to "The candidate currently has test results that are on hold. A new registration cannot be created at this time." which is supposedly the "good" popup. This popup eased my mind a little more, I knew that there could still be a chance I could fail after getting the good popup, but my chances of passing were much better since I got the good popup after more than 30 hours of leaving the test center. My quick results were finally available after like 50 hours. My hands were shaking so much trying to put my card info in to pay for the quick results that I put it in wrong the first time and almost gave myself a heart attack when it told me to re enter the card info. and I passed!!! I had never happy cried before that day. :)