Help!! I'm taking online nursing prerequisites and I messed up!!

[AndreaH6]

I'm in a terrible situation that I fully take responsibility for. I recently changed my career goals from wanting to be a pediatrician to a nurse because I was overwhelmed by the chemistry, physics, etc, and I felt like being a doctor would be a huge responsibility that I wasnt sure I could handle.

So, I've been taking my nursing prerequisites, but I've messed up big time! I'm hysterical because I cheated in both anatomy classes and my nutrition class. All of these classes are online, and I took advantage of the fact that they're online and cheated on all the tests. In my first anatomy class all the answers were on quizlet so I just memorized those. I am/was taking so many credits that I didn't leave time to study so I resorted to cheating to do well. I know this is wrong and I know I am capable of doing well without cheating but the pressures of doing well and not failing reallygot to me and now I feel terrible about myself. I feel like I'm not going to succeed in nursing school because I have grades that I didn't earn with my own knowledge. I know I could've gotten amazing grades if I did not cheat because I've never cheated so much in my life before. I've always been an A/B student (without cheating) and I just cheated myself and feel like I wasted my time in college.

Please help, what should I do? Should I retake the classes or just start studying everything over again over the summer/winter breaks to make up for the lack of knowledge I gained due to my cheating? I'm hysterical and have anxiety and feel depressed and I just made my life worse! My fears of failure and lack of confidence in myself pushed me into doing exactly into what I was afraid of ((((((((

[MiladyMalarkey, ASN, BSN]

If you really want to set things right and do yourself a service, retake the classes, possibly in person this time and learn what you need to learn. I'm here to tell you I'm in my first semester of nursing school & without a foundation in nutrition, basic biology & A&P I would have been lost. They are pre-reqs for a reason. Your instructor fires through a power point about congestive heart failure expecting you have a basic understanding of anatomy and physiology of the heart and how it works. They don't stop to reteach that, they expect you to be familiar with that already so you can build upon that. That's just an example of many. Will it suck retaking the class, yes, but, in the end, you've cheated yourself by not being able to understand basic concepts if you don't retake these classes. In future don't cheat, you can get kicked out of a school/program & black listed from affiliated schools faster than you can blink your eyes. Institutions take academic dishonesty seriously.

[araew2129, ADN]

At the very least try to audit those classes in person to learn the material. Then take the pressure off yourself by taking only the amount of courseload you can actually do, learn, and get a good grade in. Don't go into nursing school without the foundation. It will be so much worse to fail out than to wait an extra year to enter in order to actually be prepared.