Test Questions

[student23t]

I'm in my first semester of nursing school and I'm having trouble rationalizing my way through nursing questions. With no clinical experience it's hard to know what a nurse would do, or how they would do it. Most of my class feels this way. When we asked our professor how to go about these she had a person come in and give a powerpoint on "how to study and take tests." She didn't even know what NCLEX was and had no advice on answering nursing questions. It was a huge waste of time and helped no one. Anyone have any good advice?

Thank you!

[pmabraham, BSN, RN]

Good day:

When I read through material, I do my best to ask myself what do I need to know as a nurse (even though I'm just a student). What's the normal process (physiology)? What happens when this changes? How will this impact patient safety? I try to work through what is normal vs. abnormal, how to spot abnormal, etc. Then I try to test myself often with NCLEX questions covering the material being read. I.e. if I'm reading about respiratory, then Saunders, Lippincott, and other sources has a respiratory section. I always review rationales even when I get the answer correct as often times the rationale will cover related issues.

Thank you.

[LoriRNCM, ADN, ASN, RN]

You have to think about the things you've been taught so far..... ADPIE (assess first in most all situations), Erikson's, Maslow's, ABCs. Then read the question more than a couple times. Often what gets people is "when additional teaching is required", or "teaching was effective when". It's tricky if you don't really read the question. It is asking you ONE thing. Figure out what that is, and if you had ONE THING you would do as the nurse out of the answers, that's what you pick. You can usually get rid of two obviously incorrect answers.

[Aliareza, BSN]

First, ask your nursing prof where she gets her test questions from.

Then, no matter what her answer is, get yourself into Davis's success books.

First semester, our professors told us about Test Success and Fundamentals Success. They really helped a lot of students understand the nursing process and how to think like a nurse. They're very highly-rated on amazon and fairly cheap as far as nursing books go. I never needed to use either of those, but then I hit med surg. Prioritization questions were kicking my butt! I got Med Surg Success and it was a huge help. I'd just do my studying, flip to the section for whatever disorder/disease it was, and do the questions. I often couldn't even make a "passing" (75+) grade on the questions in the MS Success book, but my test grades went up in class because by using it as a pre-test of sorts, I found out what areas needed more work.

[HelloWish, ADN, BSN]

Practice questions, esp. NCLEX style. The Saunders Book covers most of fundamentals, you just have to find correlating subject material. The online part of the book has additional questions or you can google NCLEX for the particular subject of study.