scaredsilly

The MAIN job of a nursing school is to prepare students to pass the NCLEX. If you don't pass, you don't get to be a nurse. I would be VERY put off by the pass rates. I would also check to see where their clinical sites are. You want to make sure that they are affiliated with enough of the major hospitals that you would get good sites. Some schools do more clinics and nursing homes, and that is not the way you want to spend all of your clinicals.

Congratulations and thank you for the great post! Now stick around with the rest of us who are here to help out and dispel myths! :-)

Most schools make it mandatory that you have insurance and will offer you a low cost plan. Check with them and your insurance woes may well be over! You can roll the cost of the insurance into whatever financial assistance package you get. How old are you? If you are under 26, you can be covered by your parents plan. As for the testing, many schools have a student health clinic that will draw your labs and do your drug screen at a nominal cost, if not as other's mentioned try a walgreens or something like that.

Your Kaplan predictor was higher than mine and I passed first time. Best of luck!

Umm...these are some of the best Kaplan scores I have seen!!! As for SATA, if I remember correctly, QT4 was all SATA and it looks like you nailed it! Going by these scores you will do great! SATA is everyone's weakness! We all hate them, treat them like T or F questions. You should be fine.

You are not alone...you are totally normal! I haven't reached the golden one year anniversary yet, but I am getting close and it really has gotten better!! I still have a ways to go myself, but these are the things that really helped me: 1. Get some of your classmates or some other new grads at your facility together to form a support group. Just being able to vent with others in the same situation makes all the difference it the world! Knowing that everyone else is in the same boat and that you are not alone really helps! 2. Become a member of the team where you work. Offer to answer call lights for other nurses if your shift is slow, bring cookies to work, etc. This kind of thing puts everyone in your corner and they will not let you drown! You help them, they will all want to help you. 3. Never ever ever complain at work. Complain to your friends, your family, and us on AN, but NEVER at work! Put on the proverbial happy face...it pays off! and never argue with nurses on the floor, you are the new kid, they know more than you, even if you think they are wrong, don't argue. 4. Ask questions every time you are unsure, but don't ask the same question twice. Figure out a way to keep the answers where you can access them. Don't be afraid to say "I have never done this, can you show me how please", patient safety is important and they won't mind helping you. 5. Leave work at work. Easier said than done, but you need downtime, you cannot constantly worry about things that happened on your shift. Take it one shift at a time, but when it is done, make it be really DONE. 6. Celebrate the good stuff! You do something that helps patients every day of your shift...small or large, you are making a difference. Dwell on that! Whatever it is on a shift that helps, think about it, think about how you felt when that patient thanked you...it helps to know that you are making a difference!

quik absolutely can guarantee one of those is correct! :-)

Cost of housing in Colorado is absolutely ridiculous and I don't know if anyone knows why. It is even worse in the Denver area. Ermmm... not sure what experienced nurses get paid, but new grads are under paid. The salary does NOT offset the cost of housing.

Get certificates that will help with your career. Work on CEs. And other than that ENJOY life! Reconnect with family and friends you have missed during school and NCLEX study. Get a membership at the gym and USE IT! Start renting all the movies you wished you had time to see over the last several years. Read books that you don't have to memorize facts from. Go to the park, or the beach, or downtown and wander around. Smile, work hard, and you will start feeling "new normal" again soon! Happens to all of us, you are definitely NOT alone!

Happy that you passed. PVT has done some false passes. RNsRWe posted recently that someone accepted a job offer based on PVT and then found out she failed. The biggest issue with PVT is the emotional turmoil that goes with it. Imagine walking around for 2 days thinking you failed only to find out you passed and cried for no reason. Or even worse, telling everyone you passed based on PVT only to find out later that you failed. That is the reason that some of us try to discourage doing the trick. The accuracy of the old trick was around 98%, and the accuracy of the new one after 24 hours was once quite high as well, but not anymore! Risking $200 is not a great idea, but it's your money, so risk at will! Emotionally though-well that's a different story and I wouldn't risk that.

This is a new one to me as well, BUT, your entire session is video taped and the video has a time stamp. I am pretty sure that the sequence of the video when you stood up will be a second or two later than the timestamp on the computer for when the test ended. As soon as they complete the audit, you should be cleared.

If we hit 10 million pvt question posts, will the pvt start to work again?

I got 265 and passed over a year ago. The exam is torture no matter how many you get and everyone thinks that they failed.

Dude, I went online, found jobs that did not mandate a year experience and had planned to walk in my resume when I got called for an interview from the NM where I did my practicum AFTER walking my resume in there. Way more than one or two classmates, more like around 20 or 25 of them. One of them walked in a resume at Swedish, posted how she got hired that way and after we all saw it, everyone did it. The computerized system does not seem to work well at all for people with zero experience. Virtually everyone that I graduated with who stayed in Denver and landed a hospital job without having a connection at the hospital they got hired at did this to get hired. Bypassing HR was the only thing that worked for us. It is interesting to note that the NMs are usually surprised to find out that they are never seeing the applicatios that are placed online by new grads.

I guess it is the nature of the beast....people look for any little thing that will convince them that they passed because the wait is so difficult...but I cannot imagine taking the time or brain power to keep track of that.

2 months after NCLEX, my dream job at my dream hospital in L&D after ab out 300 applications

Every day I read posts here that go something like this: I had "100 questions, 27 were SATA, 4 were drag and drop, 11 EKGs, 14 OB, 6 education"(etc) It has already been made clear that the type of question has nothing to do with if you pass or fail, so I am very curious about WHY anyone keeps track--but I am even more curious about HOW anyone keeps track. When I tested, I was concentrating on the question at hand and there was no way I had the mental capacity to keep a running tab in my head about what kind of questions I was getting. Everyone knows how many total questions they get, but the rest of the tally amazes me and I would love it if someone could tell me how the heck you do that??? I also have to wonder if those who do keep track and then fail may actually be failing because they were too focused on keeping those tabs?!

A nurse with your experience should not have a problem. I would check the job posting pages for Childrens, Healthone, and Centura as well as Denver Health. With experience you should get some response applying online (unlike new grads).

12 year old comes out of his mothers post partum room carrying his 2 hour old brother and tells us that "my parents are tryin' to sleep and he won't stop making noise". ermmm.....yeah

Chaos==your head or someone else's?? LOL OP and Ginger, You actually have a LOT to lose...imagine getting charged, being convinced you failed and suffering with that belief for 48 hours....or longer in states that don't do qr. The emotional pain would be way way worse than waiting for results! or getting the good pop up, telling some people and then having to go back and tell them you failed.

WOW! That is so different! The 48 hours is so much more kind, but to us, even that seems like a long time. How long ago did NCLEX revert to computerized testing? And how many questions did you have to answer in those two days? One more question-a "big thick" envelope? What did they send??

One of my teachers told us about that. she said that the "trick" then was that the envelope it came in said RN after your name if you passed. Not much of a trick considering you see it 1 second before opening the official results LOL

Congrats, Monica!!! Told ya we all feel that way! RNsRWe, lol, I don't think she is in counselling, as long as she never needs to take NCLEX again she will be ok! hahaha

You "cant believe I did so bad that I had to stopped at 75"....maybe your shouldn't believe it....maybe you did so GOOD that it stopped at 75!!!

LOL, yes!! I had gone back to study (two days in a row) and when the 48 hour mark hit, I went to look at quick results. My hand was shaking SO hard, it took me 7 tried to get my credit card entered. When I saw I passed, I screamed. It was just a little scream, but I got some dirty looks (others were in there studying for NCLEX and probably other tests) so I ran outside to yell and scream and do a happy dance and then just never went back. I knew I left it all, I just did not care! hehehehe I work with someone who has been a nurse for three years. She said last year when she got the notice from the BON that her license was due for renewal her hand was shaking and her hubby had to open it. She thought that the BON "realized their mistake" and was writing to tell her she had failed after all and must surrender her license! That test does weird stuff to people's minds!!!!