ggmugsy

I live in North Idaho and tested in Spokane, Washington on June 6th. Completed 75 questions and was NOT feeling good about my chances. As soon as I got home I got the good pop-up. Today, quick results indicated I passed. I've been reading about this trick for years and am thrilled that it really works!

For me, patho is the background of Med-Surg. What's in the forefront of most test questions is, "As a nurse, what do I need to do for this patient?" A good friend of mine is completely into patho and had taken an advanced pathology course prior to Med-Surg. She failed out because she was so focused on pathology, she wasn't thinking like a nurse. My experience from the program I'm in is that the instructors want to see if you can do three things: 1. Can you be inundated with information and focus on what is REALLY important. 2. Can you prioritize what you need to do and manage your time to get it done. 3. Can you take what you've learned and think like a nurse? Can you apply your knowledge to your patient? (All while prioritizing and managing your time?) Just my take on it . . .

Thank you all so much! Reading your posts has been very eye-opening for me. In hindsight, I should have asked more questions about how the clinicals were run. This time next year, I'll be studying for my NCLEX and be DONE with this school. I can hardly wait!!!

Thank you all for your input! :)

In my program, there is one clinical instructor for every 10 students. Students are normally spread between 4-5 different areas of the hospital so the instructor travels around as she can to observe/help with skills. Very often, she will let our primary or charge nurse observe us doing new skills. The primary nurse(s) for our patients are supposed to review our charting. Some do, some don't. Some of the nurses are wonderful about instructing students and some of them are not. A handful of them shouldn't be allowed to work with students, but we have no control over which primary nurse is assigned to our patient. Although I feel most people are doing their best to see students have learning opportunities, if the instructor is busy and requests the charge nurse to observe, and she is busy, the student loses the opportunity to perform the skill. It's frustrating as a student to lose a valuable opportunity to experience a new skill. The program I'm in used to take 40 students each fall semester. Recently, they added an additional class of 40 students each spring. That means in any one week, about 150 students are doing 2 different shifts at a hospital that has about 250 beds. It just feels like the nurses are overwhelmed with all of us. The deeper into the semester we get, the more short-tempered the nurses are. Some are downright hostile. My classmates are telling me that nursing programs all over the country are set up the same way. I was just curious how other schools have structured the clinical environment.

Congratulations vizzle!! BIG HUG and best wishes!

I see your point . . . but . . . every question counts, and every question should be fair. If a student can prove that two answers are equally correct, we should have the opportunity to do so on every exam, including the final.

That sort of ratio seems much safer to me than having more students than nurses. :) Thanks for your response.

MN-Nurse, No personal attack upon me was necessary. I am not sitting around "counting nurses." I continually hear nurses say they "feel invaded" by the number of students on the floor. I was simply asking for information regarding other programs and hospitals.

NSNA magazine had a great article in their last publication about Horizontal Violence and how it starts in nursing school with teachers being completely nasty to students. That article described how some of the nursing instructors and many of the nurses at the hospital where I have been doing clinicals, treat nursing students. It's sad. Our instructors are supposed to WANT us to succeed. Not take pleasure in watching us fail.

Very often there would be 5 nurses on the floor - each with 4 or 5 patients and we would have 6 - 2nd semester nursing students on the floor - each with 2 patients. Often there were 1 or 2 - 2nd year nursing students with patients as well. There were times one nurse would be working with three different nursing students. It seemed completely chaotic to me, but I've never experienced another nursing program, so I don't know what's normal.

Just talking in general. Different final, different state.

I hear ya!! On my way out the door I asked when the deadline would be to "challenge" test questions. I was informed that didn't "happen" with the final exam. That means our instructors can make up any old answer they want and we have no opportunity to have questions overturned. That left them free to torture us completely unfettered! It totally sucked.

Hey everybody, I just finished my first year of an ADN program. One of the things I am unhappy with is the nurse/student ratio at clinicals. Very often - probably close to 75% of the time - the number of students on the floor exceeds the number of nurses. Is this normal? It just doesn't seem "safe" to me.

BUG HUG to you, Susan32! :) If you've been studying the same way for three tries, maybe changing up your study routine would help. Do you have a friend you could study with, or maybe start a study group of your own? Sometimes listening to how other people think through questions can help a lot. Don't give up! YOU CAN DO IT! :)

mom and nurse, Thank you for your post! :) I'm a year or so behind where you stated. I am 44 and will be starting my first semester in an ADN program in the fall. Should pass NCLEX in the Spring/Summer of 2012. I then planned to work part time as an RN while completing my BSN and then FNP. I was in tears reading that I would not be able to finish my planned program before 2015 DNP deadline. Whether the DNP requirement comes to pass or not, I'm just going to keep my head down and work toward my goal of being a FNP. Thank you all for sharing your stories!

My best friend in A&P was my butcher paper. I would take a 3' or 4' piece and draw out everything, the kidney (with afferent & efferent BV), where the juxtaglomerular apparatus was and the different cells that make it up. Draw the proximal and distal convoluted tubules and which hormone(s) affected each branch, what the hormone does and where it came from. It forces you to put all the pieces together in one place.

There are free tests at testprepreview.com. You can start there and see where you may be having trouble. There are lots of books to help. I used the McGraw Hill book and found it helpful. I did spend a lot of time learning things I didn't need to, though. I would concentrate on English, Math, and Reading Comprehension.

I wonder if you could get passionate about A&P? When I was doing my pre-reqs, I kept telling myself that A&P and Micro were the foundation of the career I want for the rest of my life. I was passionate about learning as much as I could and about understanding it. Don't think about it being difficult, or about what other people are doing, just try to absorb as much as you can. I found that drawing in-depth diagrams with definitions of critical terms helped me to pull information from different lectures and chapters that all pertained to the same subject. It helped clarify everything in my mind and helped me to do better on exams.

I hated that feeling that if I got a "B" I wouldn't make it in. I tried to focus on learning the material to the best of my ability and the grade worked itself out. To me, A&P & micro really form the basis of the work I want to do for the rest of my life. That's where I had to focus . . . kept me - somewhat - sane. :)

I had a 1st edition of the McGraw Hill Nursing School Entrance Exams book and it was FULL of errors. If you e-mail the publisher with the ISBN# of the book they will send you the list of known errors.

I didn't use the workbooks, but I did use the website a lot to review information and found that to be very helpful. Also, if you are using the lab manual, there are questions at the end of every chapter to help you review as well as pictures/drawings to label. I would definitely checkout the lab manual and see if you think the questions are sufficient berore you open the workbook.

Oops! I just re-read through and I had gotten it backwards in one of my posts. Thanks so much all you knowledgeable nurses for getting us all on the right track.

That sounds like the same thing to me. WATER is leaving the body during vomiting. The salt in the cells remains. Water doesn't follow sodium. Sodium follows water.

I would think so. My A&P teacher must have said it 10,000 times . . . "Where sodium goes, water follows." Seriously, I still hear it in my dreams. lol