ASU2021

Our class originally had 31 students and I think the class above us had 32 at the start. Congratulations to everyone!

Hey guys! I am also currently in ASU’s program and will be graduating in 2021. I see everyone has questions about the interview. Like Asu2020 said, there is a "quiz" before you go in and interview. Our quiz was mainly ABG interpretations and "what would you do in this scenario" type questions. A couple of "off the wall" questions like a molecular structure of a drug and you have to identify it. They called us mid July for an interview the first week of August and we knew our acceptance status by the end of August. Let me know if you guys have any questions and good luck to all!!!

That's funny. I was told 6 weeks.

Not yet but I'm starting to wonder if it's not a group interview on the 24th. My time is 1640. How about everyone else?

I guess they might be interviewing all the early admit applicants on the same day. That's telling of how many applied.

What interview date were you offered if you don't mind me asking? Mine and a couple of others I've seen is on August 24. Thank you for the positive words, it is just very frustrating considering all of us have put a large amount of work into applying and there has been constantly conflicting information and what I perceive as unprofessional way of conducting admissions.

I applied for early admission in April and just had an interview setup for August 24. It seems as if the program is quite disorganized. Please share your experience.

Just got my interview for August 24 as well! It seems as if this is their only interview date because when I asked for another day the assistant stated they could possibly interview on August 31st. Perhaps they're just interviewing all the early admission candidates on the same day.

Just scheduled my interview as well for late August. This admission process seems beyond disorganized. My experience so far has been quite negative and I hope it's not a reflection on the program as a whole. I applied for early admission and was told interviews would be in May by Melinda Burcham. I later called back early May and was told Melinda was no longer with the program and then there was radio silence. I emailed the Dr. Black late May asking about the details of the admission process and she apologized that I had been misinformed and stated that they were missing my BSN degree even though I attended Jonesboro for my BSN. Dr. Black later emailed me stating they were "shooting for July" as a potential interview time frame. I called again in July to ask where things stood and was told they were shooting for last week of July or first week of August. Finally now we are at Late August. This whole experience has been a mess! I hope that they aren't just combining early admission and regular admission candidates because that would be unfair to individuals that applied 3 months earlier. Who knows when we might find out when we got in. From how it's gone so far I would think it would be in December! lol Please share what your experience has been.

Congrats!!!

The same is true for my unit and that's why I felt so insecure going into the testing center because I really didn't know what to study. There is so little information out there regarding the neonatal CCRN. My best advice beyond feeling like you have a good grasp on the material would be to do those 600 questions on a loop and to watch those videos to pinpoint what you struggle understanding. Very little of the test is just regurgitating information. It's mainly applying your knowledge to scenarios I hadn't experienced before

Let me know if you have any other concerns.

While preparing for the neonatal CCRN exam I found that there wasn't much information regarding what the test was like other than the test breakdown found on the aacn website. I had seen some mentions of what books to look over such as the core curriculum and the neonatal intensive care 4e book but those are quite indepth and there's really no real way to retain all of that information without spending several years in the NICU. So here is a review of everything I did to prepare and what I feel helped. To put things in perspective I have only been in the NICU for a year and I was a new grand prior to that. I passively read the core curriculum, then I did the neonatal intensive care review questions book. I read through a copy of the NICU Solutions book which is highly recommended by many but I was not able to attend the 3 day class. The week of my test I reviewed a series of videos on youtube by Crash! Medical Review. I found them immensely helpful in narrowing down what to focus on. I also did multiple rounds of 100 questions of the neonatal core curriculum online questions since I really couldn't get access to a practice test. About the test: it was 150 questions some of which are pilot I'm not sure how many actually but aacn claims 25 are pilot. There was a lot of hypotension/hypertension, IVH, TTN, RDS, renal disorder questions, couple of PPHN. I definitely think it was as difficult if not more difficult than I anticipated but those Crash! Medical Review videos were extremely helpful and I don't believe I would have passed without them. As great as those books are I feel like the CCRN focused a lot more on pathology than those books and even the NICU solutions book led on. Please post a comment if you have any questions.

Did you find out how you did?

I did the pop up trick immediately after and 24 hours after and got the good pop up. I feel like based on the information you provided that you passed. When you turn off at a minimum amount of questions, this is my interpretation, you either did really well and required no further questions or really terrible to the point that you could not redeem yourself. Ask yourself which one is more likely. I feel like off of the information you gave you passed :) but if you find out you didn't it's not the end of the world, you just have to correct where you went wrong and hopefully next time you will pass :)

A good free resource NCLEX Practice Questions For Free - Nurseslabs

The way ATI is set up, from my experience, is you take a predictor before you start ATI based off of that you get assigned a study plan and your tutor bases your assessments and the amount of studying required off of that plan. You can complete that plan as quickly as you want and are not limited to that study plan. I completed a six week plan in two weeks. Once you complete that study plan you take another predictor and you have to score at least a 92% in order to be given the greenlight. Once you get the greenlight you just keep taking assessments until your NCLEX.

The best way to prepare is to do 100-200 questions everyday for at least two weeks, Saunders is great but it's content review, you need to practice questions that require critical thinking and strategies and not just memorization, which is what Saunders tests. Try getting your hands nclex level questions. This will prepare you the best. Just buy a Kaplan Qbank or Uworld, something with lots of nclex level questions. Good luck you got this!

I think they were on the same level of difficulty but I did have majority of my test consisting of SATA so it is difficult to say but the few MC questions were of similar difficulty so it will definitely not be harder than VATI. Another trick I use for SATA if I don't know is I try to pick answers that are similar to one another if that makes sense like if both answers have to do with dehydration I will pick them both.

I agree with all the PP comments but another approach could be dedicating yourself to your assignments and studying. If you get lost use youtube or post a question on here. You have a community of people that know what you're going through as far as school so utilize it. It's their loss if they do not want to befriend you. Frank Sinatra once said the best revenge is massive success so ace those tests with the help of youtube and all the available mnemonics!!! Some youtube resources are simple nursing, medcram, khanacademy and many more. :) It's very likely that people will start to notice your success and gravitate towards you and by that point you'll be able to pick who you wish to be friends with

That's totally true!! The very first question of my NCLEX I knew the answer to because I had taken two assessments on pharm, my weakest area, the night before. Yeah there's not too many posts on allnurses about the viability of VATI. I think it may be because the people that use it just pass the first time and move on whereas a lot of stories on here are multiple attempt ones. I didn't think it would be effective either but it ended up working. If I could tell you to practice anything it would be SATA, majority of my test was SATA and since I don't answer those well I had no idea how I was doing.

You can try old assessments or ask your tutor for more codes and if you know your weakness try to ask for more assessments in that area. I didn't listen to anyone and took a practice comprehensive assessment the day before as reassurance that I still knew something. Let me know how it goes and if I can help you!!! Good luck!!!

I kept asking for more assessments but eventually she did run out of codes

I'm sorry I didn't even think of specifying. I took the RN nclex

I am writing this post because there are not enough current stories and statements addressing the use of virtual ATI as a resource for the NCLEX in 2015. A little background, I was not excited that my school forced my class to use ATI to get my "greenlight" in order to get my ATT. Our previous 8 week experience with ATI was less than adequate. So I didn't expect much and seeing on these forums that pretty much everyone and their grandmother was using either Kaplan or HURST I was discouraged further. Since I had already paid for it I decided to give it a shot. Sidenote, this is my experience and what I did, you will probably want to do it differently. Since I wanted my ATT so badly and had to wait for the greenlight before I could get it, I ended up rushing through ATI in less than/about two weeks. I had study Plan C. Now the positive of ATI is that they give you instant feedback on the question you just answered but not during your "greenlight" comprehensive assessment. When I started ATI I would get somewhere in the low to mid 60s on my assessments but by the day before NCLEX I could expect a low 70 on any assessment. I got an 80% on the comprehensive assessment, I truly do not know how, and got my greenlight. I scheduled my test date within 2 weeks and the remainder of those 2 weeks I did every assessment the tutor could throw at me averaging about 120-180 questions a day (2 or 3 assessments a day) with the exception of the detailed med surg assessment which consists of 13 assessments lasting 30-40 questions that I completed in one day. The positive of ATI is that it trains you to start focusing on the most important answer and it repeatedly asks you questions where that is the answer. That is why, I think, some people say they memorize the questions, not because the questions are exactly the same but because the concepts are, which I think is a positive, because as you've probably heard by now, there is no way to know everything for the nclex. I took my nclex and I got about 100 questions, two-thirds of which were SATA, and today I found out I passed which is pretty great. I did not read the ATI books, which are a joke! Whenever I had trouble with a concept or such I would go look up the topic on khanacademy which is an EXCELLENT youtube resource that explains something from the pathophysiological point of view so you don't memorize you just understand. They have awesome playlists for diabetes and pulmonary disorders and hypertension etc etc. Also there is simplenursing, overly simplified but good, and crammed. If you struggle with pharm, which lets be real who doesn't, and you have access to ATI try using the pharmacology made easy under your products tab under tutorials. It is EXTREMELY lengthy but if you just do not know ANYTHING in a certain pharm category, I didn't know psych meds AT ALL, then that will be really helpful because they go into good detail and organize it by category first ex: antidepressants and list the five categories of AD and then go into each one. I thought that was a solid resource. Quizlet is also great especially for mnemonics, there is a great psych med mnemonic on there. To reiterate, I'm writing this post to let all of those people out there, that are forced to pay for ATI or have ATI as a free” resource, know that just using ATI without anything else will get your prepared enough to take the NCLEX and pass. I did read the study guide that is floating around here once and the mnemonics are pretty great, especially the one for contact precautions and fetal heart rate decelerations, but overall I just focused on doing as many questions as ATI could give me. If you're not an overachiever and are in NO WAY ever going to use three, four, five resources to prepare for the nclex then know it's okay just do a million questions and review the concepts you truly don't understand.