UKtoTX

Hey there, thanks for your sympathy :) I did pass on my first go with something like 78 questions. I wasnt sure I has passed though because it was very hard. I must say though by the time I took it I was pretty confident in the basics but when youre in there you feel like youre getting them all wrong dont you? I trained in the 2000s but did get sufficient maternal-newborn, paeds, psych and med-surg training. Learning the US way though involved a lot of independent study. I do wish Id met you on here in August. I felt so lonely bc noone else really understood the stress of undertaking this exam. Have to admit though, I think it is very doable - it's all really about safety - that's the central concept. Where do you work now?

I am a UK-educated RN who took an online HURST Review this past July 2015 and passed my NCLEX with 78 questions on first attempt this August 2015. I am so proud =) HURST was undoubtably an indispensable part of my achieving this goal. I would like to encourage NCLEX takers who use HURST to fully commit to the HURST review philosophy of learning the HURST content thoroughly "without doubt and without hesitation" and honing critical thinking skills. You cannot possibly memorize everything, so I agree with HURST that is better to have a solid core of knowledge than to try to know everything, and to use carefully practiced judgement to decide questions where you do not know the content. Questions came up in this exam that concerned diseases/situations I had barely knew about and I had to have strategies to help me work out those questions; strategies like "acute vs chronic" and "pick the killer" answer. HURST content and strategy will help you in this regard. The only slight variant on that advice I would like to leave here is for nurses like myself who did not train in the USA. For all y'all FENs out there ;0) please remember that reviews like HURST are as the word makes clear - REVIEWS. They assume that a reviewer will be a US nursing school graduate who has covered the US nursing curriculum in-depth at some time in the past. Therefore if there are areas, say for example OB, that you maybe covered only minimally in your foreign nursing education, you may need to allot some study time and a denser textbook to give yourself a more thorough grounding. Some questions - especially SATAs - can be very hard to get right if you don't have this grounding. That is just my opinion for FEN NCLEX takers. Core content teaching is great to help you focus when you have studied nursing at a US nursing school, but it may leave you without "the bigger picture" in a subject, if you have barely covered that subject before at all. Just bare that in mind when planning your study time. I work full-time in ICU so committing time was hard. I would say I needed about 3 months, with at least two full weeks of that period devoted to NCLEX. I studied the HURST review and did 3 out of 6 of the Q-tests, which I found of roughly equivalent difficulty to the NCLEX. I bought the HURST book and studied and wrote in it until it was practically falling apart. I supplemented this with the Prentice Hall series, LaCharity's Priorization, Delegation and Assignment (if you're acing this I think you're well on your way) and the Lippincott's Alternative Format Q's book. Also liked Davis (it had very challenging questions that I found far harder than NCLEX). I did not, however, take to Kaplan - each to their own, eh.

FOR ALL THOSE TRYING TO STUDY FOR THE NCLEX AND ESPECIALLY FOREIGN-EDUCATED NURSES TRYING TO GET A HANDLE ON THE NCLEX, HERE IS HOW STUDIED AND PASSED FIRST TIME WITH 78 QUESTIONS. I am a UK-educated RN who took an online HURST Review this past July 2015 and passed my NCLEX with 78 questions on first attempt this August 2015. I am so proud =) HURST was undoubtedly an indispensable part of my achieving this goal. I would like to encourage NCLEX takers who use HURST to fully commit to the HURST review philosophy of learning the HURST content thoroughly "without doubt and without hesitation" and honing critical thinking skills. You cannot possibly memorize everything, so I agree with HURST that is better to have a solid core of knowledge than to try to know everything, and to use carefully practiced judgement to decide questions where you do not know the content. Questions came up in this exam that concerned diseases/situations I had barely knew about and I had to have strategies to help me work out those questions; strategies like "acute vs chronic" and "pick the killer" answer. HURST content and strategy will help you in this regard. The only slight variant on that advice I would like to leave here is for nurses like myself who did not train in the USA. For all y'all FENs out there ;0) please remember that reviews like HURST are as the word makes clear - REVIEWS. They assume that a reviewer will be a US nursing school graduate who has covered the US nursing curriculum in-depth at some time in the past. Therefore if there are areas, say for example OB, that you maybe covered only minimally in your foreign nursing education, you may need to allot some study time and a denser textbook to give yourself a more thorough grounding. Some questions - especially SATAs - can be very hard to get right if you don't have this grounding. That is just my opinion for FEN NCLEX takers. Core content teaching is great to help you focus when you have studied nursing at a US nursing school, but it may leave you without "the bigger picture" in a subject, if you have barely covered that subject before at all. Just bare that in mind when planning your study time. I work full-time in ICU so committing time was hard. I would say I needed about 3 months, with at least two full weeks of that period devoted to NCLEX. I studied the HURST review and did 3 out of 6 of the Q-tests, which I found of equivalent difficulty to the NCLEX. I bought the HURST book and studied and wrote in it until it was practically falling apart. I supplemented this with the Prentice Hall series, LaCharity's Prioritization, Delegation and Assignment (if you're acing this I think you're well on your way) and the Lippincott's Alternative Format Q's book. Also liked Davis (it had very challenging questions that I found far harder than NCLEX). I did not, however, take to Kaplan - each to their own, eh.

I feel your pain tho man. I cannot wait to sit my NCLEX (in just over a month), see "PASS" on PV and have this thang over with.

I think while it is understandable to want to use those scores as a gauge of readiness I could take the results with a pinch of salt. In my case, I have got scores up in the 90s in LaCharity, which is a pretty tough book and 60s in Kaplan and scores in between for others. My feeling is that a person could be getting in the 80s and still flump on test day. My advise is: 1) Have a good baseline of content in all the areas - you're never gonna know it all, that's just a fact. I just had a side effect question that gave an option of 'dyschezia' and I got it wrong because I didn't know that it means constipation. I just shrugged and moved on. With content you either know it, or you don't. 2) Have a strategy for getting to the crux of questions and stick to it to steel your confidence. 3) Remember you graduated nursing school. If you can pass those tests, you can pass this one. =) =) =) Be encouraged man, you're one of thousands going through this and we all get through it

Congrats guys =) ... I have to admit I'm a wee bit envious to be on the pre-NCLEX side of things. I just want to get this monster over and get on with things. I've literally spent two weeks of vacation studying for it. I was actually dreaming about electrolyte imbalances last night ...

Hello guys, UK nurse taking my NCLEX in a month *gulp* and neck-deep in cranial nerves, malignant neuroleptic syndrome, Merperdine, Cullen sign, McBurney's point, SQ emphysema and everything else prepping for this text throws at you. I was hoping some people out there could help me clarify a few things: 1) The Kaplan Decision Tree - What does the "Is Validation Required?" trick mean? I assumed it meant, "Do you have a medical order?" which really threw me for a loop because in scenarios where you're prioritzing either 1) giving a drug or fluids or 2) calling the physician (which is rarely the right answer, right?), I'm wondering can I assume I have an order if an option is there or do I have to worry about dependent vs independent nursing interventions? My review told me that if the option is there in NCLEX world, you can confidently assume it has a medical order. Which brings me back to the Kaplan Decision Tree - is this step saying that the trick is "Do You have a medical order?" **sigh** Everything in NCLEX higher questions feels like a trick and one review will contradict another. 2) Delegating to CNAs and nursing students. Does anyone have a definitive resource for working this stuff out? Eg, in one question I did, a wrong answer was that a CNA couldn't do a blood glucose stick on a diabetic patient and report the result because "it required extra training", yet on another question the correct answer was allowing an experienced CNA to logroll a spinal surgery patient, which surely requires extra training too, but how the heck do you know??? Same with nursing students, they're trainee nurses so I assume they require some level of supervision so how do you know for sure what they can do? Often there is no cut and dry, you're guessing. 3) Does anybody go into this exam feeling well prepared? I felt prepared until like yesterday when feeling great about maternal-newborn I did some higher level questions in Lippincott's and one question was asking me to order the exact stages of Leopald's Maneuvers and another seemed to require memorization of Biophysical profiling to score a fetus - does safe nursing require an eidectic memory??? Generally I'm scoring anything from 60 - 90s on Lacharity, 50s on Lippincott's Alternate Format, 70s on Mary Ann Hogan and 60s on Kaplan. I'm just so confused about if I'll ever be ready. Feeling a little tachycardic ... someone take my pulse =)