Passed NCLEX-RN on 2nd Attempt!!!

15 Posts

This website has helped me a whole lot and it's only right that I give back my two cents to the community.

Study material:

1) Hurst Review- Mostly for content, just made everything so easy to remember and it seemed like I learned nursing school all over in a matter of several days. Highly recommend it for content review. I recommend getting your content down before going onto answering questions. IMO

2) Saunders NCLEX review 5th edition- Used for questions and supplemental content review. After reviewing a body system in Hurst, I would follow up by doing the questions on Saunders. Many of the times I would be asked a question not covered on Hurst, so I would look up the information in the book. It was great for filling in the gaps and making sure I was understanding the content. The book covers just about everything, I didn't solely stick to this book because there is just so much content, it becomes easily overwhelming. Still recommend it as must have.

3) NCSBN Learning ext online review- Used solely for their questions. It has a reputation of offering similar questions to the real NCLEX and that's exactly how it turned out to be. This is the same company that makes the real NCLEX. I credit a huge success to passing on simply doing these questions. A must have for practicing questions. When taking the NCLEX, it just felt like I was doing practice questions.

4) The Kaplan exam questions- Helped in the aspect of exposing me to different questions I wouldn't have seen. Did all 7. If you search "kaplan question trainers" on google, you should have no trouble finding a link to the questions.

5) Last but not least the all invaluable Study Guide provided by the many on this forum, that has been floating around for a long time. The pneumonics were very useful and helped me out in the end.

What helped this time around was doing about somewhere 2,500-3000 questions. Reading all the rationales and understanding why. Like I mentioned earlier by doing so many questions it exposed me to make sure I understood the content and to things I just had not seen before. Having the continuing support of closed ones around me and the power of prayer had infinite good on me. Test ended around the 86-89 mark, by this time I used up close to 3 hours. I know longer than the usual, but that was my mistake last time around, worrying so much about getting 265 questions if needed. So I recommend to take as much time as possible, worry about getting the question right and not if you will have enough time for 265. Remembering to stay calm, that they are only testing you with 2 weeks of experience, and they just want to know if you will be a safe nurse.

For those taking the exam again after a first try, don't give up, believe that you will get it. If it's your first try, you can do it. I hope this helps out future exam takers, Best Wishes.