Simple Nursing/Med-Surg help

RegularNurse · Jan 31, 2016

Ignore text books and only study from NCLEX books. Your grades will be fine.

springchick1, ADN, RN · Jan 31, 2016

Ignore text books and only study from NCLEX books. Your grades will be fine.

I did this a lot when I was in school. If there was something that just didn't make sense, I would go to the book. And pick one way to study. It sounds like you were trying multiple different things and that may be part of the problem.

Also, do a lot of NCLEX style questions while studying. Review all the rationales because that will help you understand why you answered the question wrong. The Pearson Review and Rationale series was my absolute favorite. They have a pre and a post test, with a lot of information to study in between. And that's for each topic.

jedi.judeRN · Jan 31, 2016

Hey all,
I'm a second semester nursing student working toward my ADN and recently we had our first exam in Med-Surg 1. Despite studying long hours alone, in groups, with a partner, with flashcards and notes and NCLEX questions I still only knew how to answer a few questions on the test and had to guess the rest. And while we haven't gotten our grades back yet (and won't till Monday), I'm pretty sure I failed unless I got really lucky. So I have a few questions.
First - what did you do/are you doing to study for Med-Surg? In this class they're adding in Pharm and it's completely overwhelming for me to try to study for both. Between the side effects and interventions and the clinical manifestations and all of that, I don't know where to start let alone how to study it.
Second - I was wondering if anyone has a subscription to simplenursing.com and if they considered it worth the price? I've watched some of his free videos on youtube and I really like his teaching style and how he breaks things down but I want to know if it's really worth it to fork over $15-$40 a month and if it really did help to bring anyone's grades up.
Thanks in advance!

Pharm, side effects, interventions, clinical manifestations -- while these topics seem all over the place, I found be best way to study was to think of them as a whole.

1) understand the body system being studied

2) learn the diseases and disease process by always relating them back to the questions "what is this organ supposed to be doing (when functioning normally)?" and: "What is this ailment causing it to do (or not do)?"

3) be able to look at assigned medications and say "what signs and systems of malfunction are these meds treating?" Or "what effect does this drug have on this organ, and how might that effect help treat this symptom?"

I found that when being presented with large amounts of important information, it was a necessity to figure out a way to link it all together. So that as you're studying one area, you're helping to naturally reinforce other areas (Ex: reading about COPD, thinking back to myself "how do lungs normally work and what does COPD do to that?"; and then - what meds are we using to treat COPD, what s/s do those medications treat? What are the risks (adverse reactions) associated with those medications?.... And on and on.

This is my brain getting off my night shift and heading to bed. I hope I presented this coherently enough!

Good luck to you - nursing school exams are truly special in that they all have a very specific end goal in mind: NCLEX. And so they're harder because they're trying to force you to learn a new way of testing (that you need to know to pass the NCLEX).

AceOfHearts<3 · Feb 1, 2016

Ignore text books and only study from NCLEX books. Your grades will be fine.

I disagree with this. I found reading the text really helped me pull everything together. It all really depends on the students learning style and we really don't know enough to say not to read. I actually found in my med surg 1 class that my grade got higher and higher the less I paid attention in lecture and the more I read the book due to my instructors teaching style. I technically didn't pass the first quiz in the class and had gotten my grade high enough for an A by the end of the course.

OP, the best thing you can do is contact your instructor and ask to meet with them to get tips and info. I also think understanding the pathophysiology behind what you are studying is important- it can help you figure out what is happening/might happen and what is most important. I'd also ask classmates that were successful on the exam what they did.