Passing NCLEX WITHOUT A REVIEW CLASS

Published Jan 25, 2016

1 Post

I have been reading the posts from allnurses.com during nursing school and found it very helpful and encouraging. It is good to know that I am not going through this alone. Now it is my time to give back.

I recently graduated from a BSN program in Alabama. The program itself was good, like all other BSN programs. Staff were friendly. But the thing is that you have to go talk to them. Our school's policy is that you cannot pass the course if your exam average is lower than 74.5%. When I was taking my Adult nursing I was failing the class, so I went to talking to my professor and she lent me some NCLEX books that I could take home and returned at the end of semester. The books really helped me passing the course. Now looking back I did appreciate our school had such policy, because it makes sense that if I did not pass the class with an okay grade I certainly could not pass NCLEX.

During the last semester of nursing school we had a class called nursing management, it was about the management side of clinical and hospitals. The clinicals were boring and just sitting in nurse manager's office, but the concepts of the class were important. It was about delegation and prioritization. I recommended anyone who did not have this class at least read about the content because it is one of the big areas on NCLEX.

I graduated in December and was planning to take a review class with my class but because my families were in town I did not have much time. Finally I had decided to spend all the time I can with them and then try my best to study on my own. I start studying after the new year and my NCLEX was scheduled on 01/20.

At the beginning I used Saunders book for fundamental and delegation, PEDS and OB, only to find that it was a bit too detailed. I then started to panic a bit because I did not have much time left by then. Then I started to speed up by just scanning through sections and just looked at the keypoints. At the same time I was reviewing the notes from my past classes.

Content was very important, but so was the test-taking strategies. Our school made us bought ATI (which I did not use much) and passpoint from Wolters Kluwer. Passpoint was good because it was also adaptive and predicted if you could pass NCLEX, but unfortunately the difficulty was not same as NCLEX. Besides, I used a really old Mosby's book, the questions were very detailed and hard, if only I could have spent more time on it. I also used NCLEX 101: how to pass from Rayfield. All these book except for the Saunders were old. I looked up and there wasn't any major game changer for NCELX in the past 5-10 years so I think old books should be okay. Besides, I downloaded some many NCLEX apps on my phone that I could use (I knew that I would look at it all the time...) , and I had been doing that every day, as many as I could. I discovered that sometimes they were contradicted with each other, but don't worry about it too much because they were meant to keep my test-taking strategies sharp.

I passed NCLEX with 85 questions. Reinvest those money I was supposed to spend on review class on shoes and purses. Also English is not my first language.So if I can do it, you can do it too! Nursing school is hard for a reason, and it is meant to prepare you well for the board. YOU CAN DO IT.