I used this website a lot when I was studying for the nclex, so I figure I owe it to you guys to post some tips for studying- I passed with 75 questions.
I can tell you that the infection control/precautions section on this website was huge! I had a lot of these types of questions, and all I had to do was think back to DEARPPPPMMSSI (search for infection control if you have no idea what I'm talking about).
Other than that, there was a lot of priority (I bought the priority & delegation book that a lot of people had posted about- I didn't do the whole book, but it helped to practice a bunch of questions)
I also had a lot of drugs, a lot of which I didn't recognize the names, but I could figure it out by looking at the ending of the drug name (e.g. pril = ACE inhibitor)- for studying drugs, if you are a visual learner, I would highly recommend this book of notecards that I bought at Borders, the company is mosby, and they're basically just flash cards with cartoons- these are fabulous! you can take them with you everywhere you go (and trust me, I did) and I found myself trying to picture the cards in my mind when I was taking the exam- there's another set of cards for fluids & electrolytes that was just as awesome
And finally, I would just recommend that you do lots and lots of questions (I probably did about 3000, maybe more, I wasn't really keeping track)- and I would focus more on strategies for answering the test questions versus trying to study and relearn every single thing in your review book- there's just no way you're going to know everything, so if you're taking the test and you get a question and have no idea what the answer was (which definitely happened to me many times) you have to use test strategies- this is where doing one of the test prep courses comes in really handy- my school did MedsPublishing (you can check it out online if you're interested), we had a woman come in for a few days and it was awesome, we also had online practice questions available to us for a few months- I never did Kaplan, but it sounds like this was also helpful for a lot of people. I also tried out the NCSBN website- let me tell you the questions on this website are much harder than what you will see on nclex! so don't freak out...
I also want to mention that I didn't sit there and go through every single section in my review book and do all the questions- that would just be too much for me. Instead, I did tons of questions like I said, and if there was a question that I had a really hard time with or didn't understand the rationale, I would go to my review book and look it up (I had a Saunders from a couple years ago- it's super intimidating because it's so huge). I would myself notes about it somewhere (my computer, flashcards, etc.) -I didn't always need to look at it again because I think the process of just writing something down for me was really helpful to learn stuff.
I used this website a lot when I was studying for the nclex, so I figure I owe it to you guys to post some tips for studying- I passed with 75 questions.
I can tell you that the infection control/precautions section on this website was huge! I had a lot of these types of questions, and all I had to do was think back to DEARPPPPMMSSI (search for infection control if you have no idea what I'm talking about).
Other than that, there was a lot of priority (I bought the priority & delegation book that a lot of people had posted about- I didn't do the whole book, but it helped to practice a bunch of questions)
I also had a lot of drugs, a lot of which I didn't recognize the names, but I could figure it out by looking at the ending of the drug name (e.g. pril = ACE inhibitor)- for studying drugs, if you are a visual learner, I would highly recommend this book of notecards that I bought at Borders, the company is mosby, and they're basically just flash cards with cartoons- these are fabulous! you can take them with you everywhere you go (and trust me, I did) and I found myself trying to picture the cards in my mind when I was taking the exam- there's another set of cards for fluids & electrolytes that was just as awesome
And finally, I would just recommend that you do lots and lots of questions (I probably did about 3000, maybe more, I wasn't really keeping track)- and I would focus more on strategies for answering the test questions versus trying to study and relearn every single thing in your review book- there's just no way you're going to know everything, so if you're taking the test and you get a question and have no idea what the answer was (which definitely happened to me many times) you have to use test strategies- this is where doing one of the test prep courses comes in really handy- my school did MedsPublishing (you can check it out online if you're interested), we had a woman come in for a few days and it was awesome, we also had online practice questions available to us for a few months- I never did Kaplan, but it sounds like this was also helpful for a lot of people. I also tried out the NCSBN website- let me tell you the questions on this website are much harder than what you will see on nclex! so don't freak out...
I also want to mention that I didn't sit there and go through every single section in my review book and do all the questions- that would just be too much for me. Instead, I did tons of questions like I said, and if there was a question that I had a really hard time with or didn't understand the rationale, I would go to my review book and look it up (I had a Saunders from a couple years ago- it's super intimidating because it's so huge). I would myself notes about it somewhere (my computer, flashcards, etc.) -I didn't always need to look at it again because I think the process of just writing something down for me was really helpful to learn stuff.
:D:DNice Work!!
and:tku: for your tip.
goinginsane24
22 Posts
Congratulations!!
thank you for the tips