Trouble deciding on whether to do an NCLEX RN prep

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Hello everyone! I am about to enter my fifth and FINAL semester of nursing school. My class has opted to do the Kaplan NCLEX-RN prep, which you all know is very expensive. I'm debating on it. As far as my grades go I have made As and Bs all throughout nursing school and scored over 1000 on 6 out of 7 HESI exams, although I BOMBED the OB/PEDS HESI. My question is....how many have passed without doing a prep? I just don't have that kind of extra money to spend on a prep. Thank you!!

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Specializes in Assistant Professor, Nephrology, Internal Medicine.

Do the hurst review of you do any. A friend of mine did the Kaplan twice and failed, then did hurst and passed at 75. She said that hurst made everything far more clear than Kaplan did, for a much smaller price tag.

Just to clarify, I also did the hurst review and passed at 75 within 45 minutes.

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I test Friday for the first time.

I've used ATI (through the school), Hurst, Kaplan (through the school), UWorld, and LaCharity's: Prioritization, Delegation, and Assignment.

Hurst is OK and it's good for content, but I don't feel it was worth the money.

Kaplan is really solid (content and strategy), but expensive.

I don't like ATI.

If you're good on content and want to work on strategies and answering APPLICATION and ANALYSIS questions w/out spending $300-$500 (passing-level questions), I would definitely recommend UWorld (primarily) and LaCharity.

UWorld is amazing. For only about $50 you'll have access to a question bank of 1,750 questions (for one month). EVERY answer has an incredible rationale (unlike Hurst, ATI, and Kaplan) that helps you retain information.

UWorld will make you comfortable answering SATAs (w/ over 30% of the total questions being SATAs) unlike the rest.

UWorld provides amazing statistics (you can see what % of people answered a question correctly).

If you read the reviews (which is best? which bank is MOST like NCLEX-RN?), you will see that people agree UWorld questions are MOST like NCLEX questions.

Good luck! Keep going strong.

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Specializes in PICU.

It depends on how you learn. Having a live review is good because you can ask the instructor questions. It isn't always about your grades, although it shows you know content. What you need now is how to answer the NCLEX questions. I liked Kaplan, and passed on the first time with 83 questions. I used another question book as well. I did a 5 day review course and found it very helpful to help me begin thinking in the NCLEX world.

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Thanks everyone!! HESI says if you score above the recommend score that is a good predictor of NCLEX success and I have done very well on HESI but on here I have read otherwise

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