Psych NP Board exam - practice questions from ANCC

This isn't really a large topic but I wanted to warn anyone else about to take the Psych NP board exam from ANCC not to buy the ANCC practice questions.

It costs $99 to get 150 questions through the same ANCC website where you book your actual test. I had been studying from the rather outdated review book recommended elsewhere on the ANCC site and from Victoria Mosack's review book, which has a lot of decent practice questions. But I figured the questions you buy straight from the source are going to be the most authentic.

I got a third of the questions wrong and got a message from the software: "Passing score: 75%. You did not pass." So I sort of panicked, because I just finished a perfectly good NP program and I had studied more than a little and I usually do well on standardized tests. I did a lot more studying, which interfered with the legitimate Advanced Practice nursing stuff I had planned to be doing with that time, as well as with sleeping.

The upshot is that I passed quite easily and I'm not sure that any of the additional studying I did made any difference. Besides which, the practice questions were not nearly as well written or clearly worded as the real ones, to the point that I spent time strategizing how to compensate for their poor test-writing that was totally wasted.

There is a lot of bad test prep out there and usually there's no point in complaining about it, but this came straight from the agency that actually gives the real test. It bothers me that people spend that kind of money to be misled in that way.