I passed my PMHNP boards today and frequently visited the site to figure out study materials/ tips and I wanted to pass along some knowledge.
study materials
- so I used the purple book and pocket prep together. I would read two chapters and then do 50-100 questions every day until I worked through the book and answered all of the questions. Luckily, pocket preps questions are directly from the purple book and rationales had direct page citations so it was a nice way to move through the book and reinforce topics. I worked through these before board vitals.
The ANCC iq questions were pretty good and probably most resembled the board questions. I would recommend saving these until the end.
board vitals- I heard mixed reviews regarding this source from numerous people, but I found this to be super helpful. I only did the easy and medium level questions when constructing my practice exams because the "hard" were basically impossible. The ethics/legal/policy were especially helpful. Overall I would highly recommend doing this once going through pocket prep and the purple book
Lantern review- I got this kind of last minute and would not buy this product. Again heard mixed reviews but I would not use this. A lot of the topics were too basic and others too random. IMO I would skip this.
-advice: do pocket prep and pp to get a solid foundation then work through bv. Also, make sure to do practice exams that are 175 questions under timed conditions. Also, make sure to hit your "checkpoints" on time during the exam- after 1 hr should be in the high 50s, 2 hrs should be at 100-110 and so forth. I'm usually a fast test taker and only had 3 minutes to spare
- for the exam itself, I had quiet a few NMS questions, ethics/ QI/policy stuff. I felt the questions were pretty random. Also, make sure to hit what part of the assessment gets documented in which section- though process, where to document SI. Dementia was big. Screeners-phq, cows, ciwa.
