Drmy4ever

nursetim: Not sure if you'll still be reading this thread, but i have another question. I'm considering Rush Univ & Duke. Rush because their DNP program has been going on for almost 20 years and has a business focus. Duke ... for the name! Rush cost 10K less than Duke but Duke has 2 elective courses... I take it that you graduated from Duke's DNP program, have your considered other univ.? I heard that the acceptance rate for Duke is 25%, not sure if I'll have a chance since I'm pretty new in the NP field (used to be an accountant for 20 years because changing career.) Any thoughts will be much appreciated.

btw, someone sent me a private message and asked me about my average scores so i thought i'll share this with everyone. according to my kaplan instructor, if you get the following percentage, you are ready for the exam: kaplan's q bank average: 70 - 75%, my lowest was 52% and highest was 86% :chuckle , mostly in the 60s% & 70s%. kaplan's question trainer average: 60 - 65% my lowest was 51% :imbar and highest was 60%, and i didn't do test 7.

sarita279 vbmenu_register("postmenu_1494318", true); : congrats! we did it!

I should say the question Style is similar. The way the question was structured, make sense? As said in my first post, I didn't say picking out the answers were easy, I could, in most case, narrowed it down to two by used my patho & pharm knowledge but if I still had no clue at that point, then I used the Kaplan method to pick out what I thought might be the correct answer. I guess I'm totally for Kaplan.... because I passed, which tells me that whatever I did to arrived at the answers must be working. Hope that helps.

Best of luck to both of you! Again, I don't want to mislead anyone by saying Saunder wasn't helpful. It was good for content review. But in my case, since I didn't have time to go thru ALL the topics, and there's no way I will know which topic will be in my exam, I focused on the Kaplan program which prepped me in test taking strategy. Like my Kaplan instructor said, even if you don't know any patho & pharms, Kaplan can still teach you ways to pass the test. That might be an overstatement but it does work on SOME of the questions. None of my Kaplan questions showed up on NCLEX, but the principle & strategy really helped and I was very used to seeing the same style questions. Just want to clarify.... if you have more than 6 weeks, do Saunders first before jumping into Kaplan. In my case, I did selective content review from Saunders and then I focused on Kaplan.

I got a lot of valuable information from this site and now it's give back time. I took my NCLEX on 1/9 in CA, my school Fed Ex my transcript to the BRN on the 12th, BRN entered my transcript information on the 18th, and my result was posted on 1/19 on the BRN web site. I can talk about the emotion going into the exam and how I felt afterward, but it's very much like everyone else... so I'll just give my two cents on the programs that I used and how they'd or had not helped me in prepping for the exam. I took a 6 weeks Kaplan course (cost $455) beginning in mid-October. Each class was about 3-4hr long and we mainly went thru tons of review questions and some content review. The course comes with a Trainer CD which has 7 tests, ranges from 75 - 265 questions. (I did the first 6 tests but could get myself to do the last one since it was 265 questions long). I also bought the Q-bank w/ the Kaplan course, which is another 1000 online questions and I did all of them. I also bought Saunders-Comprehensive Review since it's highly recommended. But since there are SO MANY questions in this program, I only used the study mode to review contents on Cardiac, Peds & L&D. I did close to 1000 questions in Saunders. After taking the test, I felt that Kaplan's questions styles were very similar to the NCLEX's questions (the way that the questions were worded). However, the answers choices in the NCLEX were much harder to choose from. The strategy that was taught in class and on the Kaplan web site did helped me in narrowing down quite a few answers. Saunders's questions, on the other hand, were nothing like the NCLEX. Other than providing me the content review, I really didn't feel that it did anything to prep me for the exam. Here's some stats. I did a total of 2800 questions prior to the exam (my goal was 3000). I took the test in a 1 hr and 45 min. (spent too much time on a few questions in the beginning) and the computer shut down at 75 questions. Please understand that I'm by no mean trying to discourage the use of Saunders because if you need content review and if you have the time, then you should definitely go thru Saunders first. However, in my opinion, Kaplan was the program that really prepped me for the exam and I would highly recommend it. BTW........... by His grace .......I passed!

I took my exam on 1/7, school transcript was sent on 1/12 (yea, slow in getting our Fall transcript out), and I got my result online on the 19th..... (i passed).

Hi Miss Mab, Did you find out your result yet? Also, which nursing school were you in and where are you working right now. Just curious since I'm also in the Bay Area. Keeping my fingers crossed for you!

thanks for sharing your study method...... and did i say.... :balloons: congrats!!! :balloons:

Hi, I'm in CA too. Have you checked out Kaplan? I'm just curious because I heard that their questions are more similar to the NCLEX. How many questions have you done in preping for the exam? Hey, you can sit back and relax now that you're done. Let us know how you did later.

So happy for you!!! I'm planning to take my board in late December. Can you share your success story.... like which study method/book did you use and how many questions have you done a day and all together? Thanks.

CONGRATS! BTW, how do people know that they got the last one right or wrong? yet to take the exam.

Thanks a million! Great info and great advice. ~Angelina

Are the questions in the quiz, test and Study sections from the same queston pool? I have the same book/disk and was just wondering which section I should go to.

Thank you for all your advice. They were very helpful and I'm feeling better that I haven't completely wasted my money on Kaplan. BTW, have you taken your exam and how did you do? Drmy4ever I think that the two review materials are not similar enough to say that you can take one over the other, but they are complimentary. One picks up where the other one leaves off. I actually find that I have enough time to do both. Again, it's complimentary studying. I do X amount of questions from this book, and another X amount of questions from another book. At the end, I find that I've had a well rounded day.