Passed NCLEX. My Advice to You.

2 Posts

Hello wonderful nursing students and nursing graduates who have the much dreaded upcoming NCLEX exam. This thread is support those who will be taking their NCLEX soon, and who have taken it in the past and did not pass.

I just want to reach out and tell my story about taking the NCLEX that I hope will help those of you who are about to take their NCLEX and those who have taken their NCLEX and have not passed. First I want to say that I did not pass the NCLEX on my first attempt. I was at question 216 before I ran out of time. I spent the entire 6 hours in the testing room like a deer caught in the headlights. I had not realized that I had frozen up from a bad case of anxiety until I started to relive the experience with family days after. One thing to remember is that anxiety will kick in. But just remember to BREATHE, and remember that you are awesome. I immediately knew that I did not pass. I knew that the odds of passing were not in my favor having run out time. I was shocked, devastated, embarrassed, frustrated, depressed, sat motionless on the couch for several weeks (until i started to feel a dull numbing pain in my calf that would surprisingly awaken me at night - NOT good!) As a nursing student I new that this is not a good sign, as I was immobile for several days and did not have the best circulation going on in my legs. Basically I turned into a hermit, and I closed in on myself from the devastation of not passing. I felt inadequate, I had to explain to so many people how I did not pass, and I just felt like a rock bottom had been hit. It took me a couple of months to finally get over my depression and become motivated again to start studying. I of course had to wait the 45 days, and applied for a California license in the meantime (which took about 6 weeks for my application to get processed).

NOTE FOR CA APPLICANTS: If you are wondering about the CA board of registered nursing processing time for NCLEX applicants, do not fret! It does not take as long to get processed anymore. It took them 6 weeks to approve me. I had completed my nursing program from the state of Utah, and had gone to 5 different colleges to complete my pre-requisites that are required to get into the program. With all the paper work and documents that I submitted, you would think I was for sure to wait a long time to get processed. But as I said, it took 6 weeks for them to send me my ATT. So therefore, get your application in as soon as you can. And then just be patient. Study in the mean time. You WILL get your ATT. They seem to have things more together now. So just go and get it done :)

Once I received my ATT, I thought to myself, "Oh crap, this is it. This is it." It was time for me to stop feeling sorry for myself. It was time for me to handle my s**t, it was time for me to PASS the NCLEX..

How I studied:

I studied for 3 months straight. However, I do not recommend taking this amount of time to study before you take the NCLEX. I lost a lot things, experiences, and happiness in my life because I dedicated almost every days to studying. I was determined to read the entire Saunder's NCLEX book. This was not a good idea. While I tried to read it all, I eventually started to realize that I was not retaining all of the information that I was putting in so much time to try to learn. I later realized that while it is important to have a good pathophysiological and nursing knowledge base to pass the NCLEX, the truth is, the NCLEX is not a test on your knowledge base (said only from my perception and personal experience).

Yes, you do have to utilize your knowledge base to make an educated guess on each question. But for me, here is what I perceive to be the trick of NCLEX: It tests you on your ability to discriminate between answer choices and decide on an answer choice that best fits the information in the question. From my experience, I believe that the NCLEX tests you on your ability to evaluate each answer choice and decide which one BEST fits the description of the question.

Many times I have read a question, and immediately am able to determine what the correct answer possibly is. Then I look for that answer in the answer choices, and lo and behold, the answer that I expected to find in the answer choices just isn't there! ? Then panic starts to set in, and you start thinking that there must have been something that you didnt study on that topic, you must not have enough knowledge on that topic, you must have been tricked, etc... Okay, this is where you have to take a deep breath, and start to look at each answer choice, and analyze and discriminate between each of the choices. Immediately eliminate the ones that you know are not correct. Continue to eliminate answer choices based on YOUR critical thinking and reasoning. TRUST YOURSELF. You will most likely be left with two answer choices that you just cannot decide which one could be the correct one. My advice here is to again, take a deep breath, and go with your first instinct, gut feeling. Recall specific words that you might have read, certain theories that you remember on that topic.

Remember that the NCLEX is testing for entry level minimum competency in nursing. Trust your knowledge and your first instinct. Remember that your mind is a marvelous thing that has brought you all this way. My recommendation is to go over many many NCLEX type questions, score yourself, and then GO BACK and read the rationale. The rationales help you to understand critical thinking and reasoning. An excellent source to utilize that contains thousands of NCLEX type question is the Silvestri NCLEX question bank program. If you have the Saunders NCLEX book, then it should come with a resource link that you can access through your evolve account. IF you do not have an evolve account, look into getting one. The NCLEX book is very helpful to brush up on knowledge for certain topics that you know you are not too confident with.

Lastly: trust in yourself, stay dedicated, remember to breathe, remember that you have overcome many obstacles to get to where you are now. You CAN pass and guess what, you will.

The Day I Took the NCLEX for the Second Time:

Okay to wrap things up (because I could go on and on about how it was like for me), I wore comfortable clothes, took snacks, water bottles, basically I prepared to be there for another 6 hours. Thankfully, the test stopped at 75 questions, it took me 2 hours, and the results were a PASS.

Good luck to you ALL. YOU can do it. Your dedication and hard work will pay off.