NurseTT22

Hey everyone, I promised myself I would leave a post on "allnurses" because I literally stalked this site for like a month before I decided what courses to take in preparation for the NCLEX-RN. I honestly HATE studying and everyone in my classes will tell you that. Studying bores me to TEARS! But I figured let me just pull up my boot straps or however the saying goes and get to it. I started studying the two days after my last final which I believe was May 10th and my exam was scheduled for July 24th. I started with the Saunder's Review book (the yellow one) for content review in areas that I knew I was weak in (like Labor & delivery and Pharmacology). I did questions at the end of each chapter but I really wasn't focused on banging out questions as much as I wanted to really get the areas that I am poor in out of the way. Side Note: My school also offers ATI, which I did not find to be very useful because they had sessions from 8am-3pm with an hour break. My attention span is NOT going to make it through all of that! But I did use their website to do questions and the ATI book given to us for the review to look up a few things. But I set my own pace with studying being as I had a lot of time. In June I signed up for the NCSBN course and found that to be very useful as well but they had SO much content review that I didn't need. So i just ended up doing all the questions and going back to questions I got wrong and doing quick reviews. The thing I liked about NCSBN is that the questions were a little more difficult than Saunders. Which I was grateful for because that NCLEX exam was NO JOKE. So i took the 5 week course from June to the beginning of July. When I was done with that I had done maybe 1,000 questions in total between Saunders and the NCSBN (maybe more). It was precisely July 6th when I got really serious about studying. I studied every single day (ok maybe I skipped a few Saturdays to hang out with my friends), but I actually studied; woke up early (which is any time before 11am), turned my phone off, got some coffee, and did questions until I couldn't do any more. I suggest a minimum of 100 questions a day when you're getting close to your test day (like for a week or two). I'm a little crazy and refused to fail so I was doing close to 200 questions every day. lol Then I googled "Kaplan trainers" one day cause all my friends were talking about how much that helped...and some slide shows came up in the search results. Let me tell you guys that really helped (and this is 6 days before my exam I found this out). So i did as many of those questions as I could. It really put me at ease when I was getting decent scores on them. I mean the answers are right under each question but you can work your computer so you don't scroll down to see the answer before you finish reading the question. Lastly- I commute to the city (for 42 minutes) to get to work some days. On your iPad (or even iPhone, and maybe touch) you can download FOR FREE Kaplan Mini Q Bank. DO THOSE! you can do 5 questions here or 10 questions there when you have free time. But mostly: try to get up early to study. Do NOT study late at night when it is harder to retain information (the rationales). Remove yourself from noisy environments, COFFEE, and take breaks as you need them. Each review course has different styles when writing questions. I feel like the combination of Kaplan, Saunders, NCSBN & ATI was definitely helpful. But now maybe I think I went overboard. Oh also read ALLLLLL of the rationales, even the questions you got right (that tip I read somewhere else and it helped me a lot too) Last week I took my NCLEX. I was extremely nervous. I even had to take a break after question like 30 to calm myself down because I was so scared I was doing poorly. However, my test stopped at question 75 and two days later I found out I passed. Yes I did well in Nursing School. I got good grades but I still had no idea what to expect for this exam so I over-prepared rather than under-prepared! I hope that I was able to give everyone some tips! If you study the way I just did you can do NCSBN for $50 & get the Saunder's for $45 (everything else was free)... and you can pass with 75 questions! BE CONFIDENT IN YOURSELF ( that was the best advice I was given by a professor at my school). Good luck to you all and God Bless :)