TikTokk

The thing with Saunders is that it is a MASSIVE amount of info crammed into a single volume. The book essentially condenses two years of nursing school into its pages...and it does this very well. However, I'm not sure that reading this cover to cover is the best use of time for someone that JUST graduated and will be taking their test within the next couple of months. I agree with the OP...this is an AMAZING resource for someone that has been out of nursing school for several years and needs to refresh. Your focus directly out of nursing school (as it relates to NCLEX) should be on how to answer NCLEX style questions and NCLEX answering strategies. Saunders will definitely not give you this. The questions in the Saunders book are NOT nclex style questions - trust me. The questions in Saunders are simply to test your knowledge on the information from a chapter that you just completed. This is why you will almost always hear people say they felt the Saunders questions were "too easy". One thing that Uworld does better than any other studying material I've used (and I used a lot!) is SATA. Uworld SATA questions are, bar none, the best of the best. About half of my NCLEX test were SATA questions and Uworld really helped me with this. No matter how many questions you set for yourself in Uworld, it feels as though about 20 to 30% of your practice test will always be SATA). After completing their 1,900+ question bank, you will feel very comfortable answering these types of questions =)

Hello ! Studying pharm with just 5 days till your test date is pretty futile. The thing with pharm is that you could honestly study this subject for years upon years and STILL get a drug on your NCLEX that you have never heard of before in your life. =) Many of the pharm questions on NCLEX (from my personal experience and passed on 2nd attemp) have some sort of context within the actual question that allows you to make a fairly educated answer based on the knowledge that you will already have acquired from nursing school and from your kaplan studies. But then you will also get NCLEX questions that literally just tell you the name of some random drug and ask you what to watch out for (risks, side effects, etc). You would think that this style of question would be knowledge based and "below the competency line", but I had two of these types of pharm questions near the end of my test (and passed @75 questions) - never heard or seen these drugs in my life and will probably continue to never hear or see them for the rest of my nursing career. People say to learn classes of drugs rather than individual drugs. This is good advice, however it too has its limitations. This will only work if your NCLEX question provides context and you can deduce the classification of the drug from reading the stem. If the question has no (or very little) context, this doesn't work - you still would basically need to memorize the NAME of every single possible drug WITHIN the class that you are studying in order to identify it - which is completely impossible. Studying suffixes is helpful too, but there are MANY exceptions to the suffix rules. However....having said all that...that are certain drugs that you should definitely take the time to learn and memorize, or make sure you already know before your test. * Digoxin (know this drug backwards and forwards) * Lithium (know this drug backwards and forwards) * Nitroglycerin (know everything there is to know about this drug) * Methylphenidate * The name of all the antiplatelets and anticoags (including prusagrel, rivaroxaban, apixaban, etc, etc) * Beta blockers, ACE's, ARBS, Calicum Channel Blockers * Asthmatic drugs (fluticason, salmeterol, albuterol, ipratropium, tiotriopium, etc, etc) * Statins * Benztropine * Radio active iodine and levothyroxine backwards and forwards (most commonly prescribed drug in the US) * drugs ending in -fil, like sildenafil and tadalafil (these are some of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the US) * MAOI, SSRI, benzos * the 4 drugs given for TB (rifapentine, isoniazid, ethambutol, pyrazinamide) * common antidotes: vitamin K, flumazenil, naloxone, protamine sulfate, activated charcoal for salicylates, etc, * common diuretics: bumetanide, hydrochlorothiazide, chlorthalidone, spironolactone, etc, I understand that pharm can seem like such a monumental subject....but just put faith in the pharmacology content that you know is already up in your head...and brush up on the most important stuff (above). You got this!! Good luck on your test. Please keep us posted!

I was going to finally break down and do that today...but no need....just found out I passed!!

This is test just boggles my mind....I don't get it at all. I took the NCLEX back in February and used Kaplan to its fullest capacity. Walked in to the testing center feeling super confident. I was positive that I'd be shut off at 75 questions and was fairly sure of my answers up till that point. But it didn't shut down at 75. Well 6 hours and 265 questions later, I felt like I had been taken out to a back alley and beaten to the point of death. Over 50% of my test was SATA, about 20 infection control questions, zero med calculation question and an insane number of OB questions. I gave up on counting the number of questions that began with, "Your patient is at ## weeks gestation.......". 4 weeks later, I found out I failed. I was a straight A student all throughout school, graduated with high honors, and even tutored 1st semester students. I really just didn't understand where I went wrong with this test. It was the absolute worst feeling and I felt completely defeated, especially when all my classmates around me were passing left and right. So after an extended pity party, I got back on the band wagon in October. I switched to UWORLD, LaCharity and a moderate amount of Saunders. I did the entire UWORLD bank twice (and had a 70% pass rate with a 92 percentile ranking the first time around). I typed up about 120 pages of notes while completing UWORLD, and studied those notes backwards and forwards. I studied pretty much 8-10 hours a day, 7 days a week. So I just retook my test today...and again, I am completely baffled. This experience was completely different. And the difference was - the test shut off at 75 questions AND the questions seemed REALLY difficult....questions on topics that I never saw on UWORLD, nor Kaplan. Questions where I was like, "uhhhhh, I never heard of this before in my life"...drugs that might well have just have been written in Chinese. And the WORST kind of drug questions too. The ones with no context....just "Your patient is given some random drug, what should you watch out for". In fact, I think there was only like 3 questions that I could answer in complete confidence and whose answers I could pull from my memory of those 120 pages of notes.....and the rest were educated guesses. Never even got a chance to use the countless number of mnemonics and memory tricks that I made up...because, yeah absolutely none of it was on my test. I was ready to go to town on my little whiteboard with all those graphs, charts and tables that I memorized. But nope, didn't need any of those either. I had about 40 SATA, 1 ECG, 1 drag and drop, 6 meds, and zero OB and zero calculation questions. Then there were other questions that just seemed insanely specific. Questions where I would be thinking...."yeah, I guess I WOULD HAVE known that answer IF I had memorized that one single sentence from the Saunders book on page 1024 in the 16th line of the 18th paragraph!!". I basically left feeling like I studied for a completely different test. I guess that I really just don't understand how to study for this thing. People say all the time that they leave feeling like they failed...but then passed. Really...that reflects a test design that I cannot wrap my head around. Licenses are handed out left and right to test takers that consistently claim they felt they had "guessed" on a large number of questions. Again, it's just such an odd design and appears flawed on the surface. Is this simply luck that they passed...or some element of Bloom's taxonomy at work that is completely beyond my comprehension. So anyways....kinda frustrated and just had to vent, lol :) I'm in CA, so it could actually take weeks to find out my results unfortunately. Thanks for reading this far...and wish me luck!! If I pass, I will be completely dumbfounded.

Hello, I have a question regarding the Breeze website. I keep hearing people talking about seeing a "pending" application status when logging on to their Breeze account. But for some reason I don't see this. I took my NCLEX back in January and failed. I retook the test today. When I processed my renewal application....I never used the "START A NEW APPLICATION" thru the Breeze website. I was required to print a reapplication form from the BON and then snail mailed my payment and application. The only thing I did "online" was make a payment to PearsonVue and schedule the exam thru their website. I'm in CA btw. I took a screen shot of my breeze screen 2 days before the test....and then took another screenshot about 30 minutes after I took my NCLEX. But absolutely nothing has changed...the screenshots are exactly the same....there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that I just took a test today. Under the "Applications" section of Breeze, all it says is "Start a New Application or Take Exam". At the top it say "Manage Your Application" and says "Registered Nurse - RN File #####" directly under it. And from the dropdown box, I have the option to "change address" or "repeat/reapply". At the top right, it says, "No License Information Available" Where exactly are you supposed to see this "pending status"?? Should everyone be seeing this status directly after taking the test?? Another weird thing...on the Breeze website, there is a section called "Payment Receipts". When I click on it, it only has a record of my payment for the NCLEX I took back in January....it does not have any history of payment for the NCLEX I just recently took. It's as if the test I took today just all happened in my head, lol Does this sound weird? Is it because I used snail mail for my re-application, and did not pay for it directly through the Breeze website? I was hoping to keep an eye on this pending status, because I seem to remember seeing that there the first time I took the test....it stayed there for about a week and then was "deleted"...which I interpreted to mean that I had failed (which, of course I did...but i did not find this out definitively until I received a snail mail 2 weeks later). Any help would be appreciated =)

Ahhhh! That post answers my question to a T! Thank you so much. So with the final question (aka final ability estimate), the 95% goes out the window and does indeed determine pass or fail. Got it! Thus, it truly is a coin flip. So my original question still stands. You wanna coin flip at 265, or just let the time run out before hitting the end and bank on the ROOT rule?

Ahhhh! I getchya now! Makes sense...thank you!

Excellent info! Thank you mrsboots87 and amysiuk! I'll definitely look at those videos from Jake and the FAQ's on NCSBN. However, just a quick response to the following comment: Just to clarify, I did not state that getting the 265th question correct is an auto-pass. Rather, the type of question (analysis/application vs. content/knowledge) and how you answer that question determines pass or fail. And again, this info is not from me. This info is put forth by Kaplan and is explained quite extensively through their program, not to mention there are countless threads regarding this exact topic here on allnurses (albeit, with no real consensus). The idea is that if you reach 265, the computer has NOT BEEN ABLE to determine if the test taker is above or below passing standard with a 95% confidence interval (because you have continuously remained on OR near the line of competency, yet never staying above or below this line for the required amount of time to determine that 95% confidence interval). Thus, the computer must simply use the last question to make its determination because the computer has NO ALTERNATIVE in determining if minimum competency was met . I'm simply trying to corroborate the info. Hopefully, I will find that on NCSBN's faqs. Thanks again! Fingers crossed on my results!!

I'm confused about people that are saying they are getting a good pop up with an expired card. If you put in an expired card, all that happens is you cannot continue until you put in a valid expiration date. Literally, all that happens is you immediately get a tiny little line of text that says, "Please enter valid expiration date". Is this what you guys are interpreting as being the "bad pop up?...that tiny little message that tells you to enter a valid expiration date?? Thx!

Hello all. I recently took my nclex and went all the way to 265 and took the entire time to do it (without any breaks). Now, I'll admit, I went into the test with the (incorrect) understanding that you would auto-fail if you did not fully complete the test in the time frame given. So once I knew that I was in for the long haul, I basically rushed during the last quarter to make sure I did not run out of time. This is my own fault, but now I know that you do not necessarily fail just because you ran out of time. Now before I ask my question, I need to preface a few things - I used Kaplan for my studies, and they were very clear on the following: if you reach 265 questions, your pass or fail is based COMPLETELY ON THE VERY LAST QUESTION due to the fact that the computer was unable to determine your competency because you were unable to consistently remain above or below the minimum competency line. Thus, if the last question was an analysis/application question and you got the answer correct - you pass. If you got the answer wrong - you fail. Conversely, if your last question was a content/knowledge based question (i.e below the minimum competency line) - you fail regardless if you answered this question correctly or incorrectly. Now, the other thing I've read is that if you run out of time, the computer somehow averages out your competency based on how you answered the last 60 or so questions (this 60 is arbitrary - I really don't know if it's 60. It could possibly be any number for all I know). In my case, once I got to about 150, I just knew I was going to go to the end. The problem here is that I knew my ability to stay focused and accurately critically think out each question would diminish as the clocked ticked by. I mean seriously, at around 220, I think I was slowly going insane, having to read a single question multiple times just in order to comprehend it. So now here are my questions: 1)Assuming the "last question" rule and the "last 60 questions rule" are both accurate (and not simply myths)...........why in the world would ANYONE allow themselves to get to the last question?? Essentially, if you allow yourself to answer the last question, you are flipping a coin. In Kaplan's own words, "If you get to 265, you have a 50/50 chance of passing". I mean, why not just stop at 264, take a break and go eat a Slim Jim and let the clock run out? Would you rather have your fate determined by the flip of a coin, or have your fate determined by your faith in how you answered the last 60 questions? 2) Another thing I don't get about this "last 60 questions rule" when you run out of time is this: If the computer can determine you were competent (or NOT competent) at the moment you run out of time, why wouldn't the computer have just shut off anyways prior to this moment? You could even take this to the extreme: why not purposely stop around 150 (if you think your in for the long haul) and just let the clock run out? I would be much more confident in my last 60 questions at 150 rather than my last 60 questions at 265 (again, this is due to critical thinking abilities decaying as the hours tick by). Again, I could be completely wrong on everything I'm saying. I'm posting this here, because I'm just looking for some understanding and want to be educated on the facts of how the test determines competency when you either a) you hit question 265 or b) run out of time. I've read several posts where people get to 265 and know "for a fact" they answered the last question wrong and still pass. So I wonder now if Kaplan is correct on this "last question" theory?

Thank you for this tip...it worked! And yep, I'm at Holy Cross. If I remember correctly, it was on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Non bridge program students should be starting clinicals on April 1st. However, "skills lab" will start on Feb 11. I'm quite certain that uniforms will be required for skills lab. Dove states a ship date of two weeks prior to "clinicals" on 1/27...which is exactly two weeks before the day of our first skills lab. Crossing my fingers that these things fit! lol!

Update: nvm...the nursing dept has announced that this is a known issue and that they are working on it.

Anyone else having problems accessing the sections numbers on the Spring '14 class schedule catolog online? I can see all subjects EXCEPT nursing. I would just like to see dates and times for clinicals, since the email we received did not seem to mention them.

Personally, I will be working 30 hours a week during this program (gotta pay the bills and put food on the table ). I just spoke with two CoC nursing students who are finishing their two years this week. I asked both of them to give me their honest opinion about working during nursing school. They both said that working was TOTALLY do'able. They also knew several students in the current cohort that had been working full-time during the program. Additionally, they couldn't speak for other nursing programs, but they felt that the CoC program was not completely life-consuming, as is usually the stigma of nursing school. Even our own Dean said during our orientation that this program did not meet full-time status, and that we should feel free to pick up any additional courses we may need or want to take. Are you in the bridge program? I have not yet received any schedule or registration time. (Although I do have my standard Spring registration date and time for general classes. I'm just not sure if this is supposed to be the same date that I will be registering for the Spring nursing classes). Has anyone here, who is not in the bridge program received their schedule of classes yet?

I agree with Whispera, If what your sister "thinks" doesn't jive with what the school "says", I would personally err on the side of the school. You definitely want to call the school and get that bit straightened out, because if you really don't have to study for the TEAS test your gonna want to be jumping for joy. Also, keep in mind that 64% is just the "passing" percentage in order to be considered for acceptance. To actually be accepted into the program, your college will undoubtedly require a much higher percentage. Understanding how competitive your program is will help you judge what kind of score to shoot for. -TikTokk