Studying For NCLEX: I just took the NCLEX last week and found out I passed couple days later. The only study tool I used for the NCLEX was UWORLD and I guess just whatever I retained in nursing school. What I did was I purchased UWORLD during the last couple weeks of nursing school and just did about 25 questions a day. This still took me almost 2 hours a day because I would study each and every rationale. The ones that were completely new to me and I knew I would forget I marked them to look at for future use. So I did this until graduation. Then I went on vacation for a month, but even when I was on vacation I did 25 to 50 questions a day. Sometimes I did 75 but I recommend not doing so many in one day or else your brain gets tired and you're just burnt out. What I also highly suggest people to do is when you do a question, and you know it's useful information that you'll probably forget is to take a picture of the rationale with your phone. This was literally a lifesaver for me as it was kind of like making my own NCLEX phone app where I could study on the go, especially on the plane. And it's much easier to pull out your phone than your computer. Also when your subscription runs out you don't have to renew since you have taken pictures. Another great thing you can do is you can save all of the diagrams and pictures from UWORLD to your computer by just right clicking on them and hitting "save image as" (as you all probably already know how to do). Since I scheduled the NCLEX about 2 months after my graduation I had just enough time to go through every single question in the question bank. Then when I finished all the questions I filtered out just the questions I marked and did them again, including reading each rationale again. Yes it's time consuming, but very worth it as UWORLD has the best and most informative rationales. So I did this every day up until it was finally time to take the test.

Day of the Test: So most of you will probably freak out when I say that most of the questions that I got on the NCLEX I didn't even recognize from UWORLD. They were all different except for maybe a couple. But what UWORLD helped me out with is being prepared for the TYPE of questions we see on NCLEX. It got my brain used to taking NCLEX style questions and learning to differentiate right answers from wrong. You will be glad to hear that I do think the NCLEX was easier than UWORLD. UWORLD gets into a lot of details. But it's hard to say since everyone gets so many random questions. Oddly the majority of my questions were OB, whereas one of my friends had mostly peds questions. So be prepared to see anything. I stopped at 96 questions. Which brings me to my next point. Everyone, or mostly everyone from my class got stopped at 75 questions and all passed. So you could imagine my anxiety when mine didn't stop at 75 and kept going. My biggest advice for everyone when taking the NCLEX is to NOT freak out if you go passed 75. That is exactly what I did as I panicked and started going through the questions faster thinking I might run out of time if I end up having to take the max number of questions. Because of that anxiety I really thought I had failed the test as I went from being confident, taking questions calmly and carefully to panicky and quickly. I was ready to see that I failed the exam when I checked the results but to my pleasant surprise I had passed. So take a deep breath guys, you've made it past nursing school, one more test to go, you totally can do this.

This is very encouraging as I have been using UWORLD only as well. I am the last of my class to take my NCLEX because I went on vacation before I started studying. I test next week, and am very anxious and nervous.

Thank You!

Great Job! Thanks! I'm taking mines next week. I wish I can say the same! At this time, I'm just re-doing the ones I had missed which is approximately 700 questions! Hopefully, if I have time...I will go trough the questions again until next week!

Of course guys. Haha sounds like we were in the same boat as I took a vacation right after graduation and was the last one in my class to take it as well. I forgot to mention that I think you guys should definitely touch up on safety precautions (standard, contact, airborne, droplet), delegation questions, and of course the famous "which patient would you assess or see first" questions. Really get a feel for which patient is in dire need of care before the others. The process of elimination is your friend especially with those types of questions.

I passed by just doing UWORLD I studied 10-12 hours a day for three weeks. Cause I didn't have enough time I did tutor mode and looked up every disease and procedure on Utube cause I am visual and auditory learner. Memorized every lab and focused on knowing only the first 5 or less drugs for every disease. Knew every test available to know what kind of disease the person world have. Many many many hours doing priority question

Whoa. That's amazing. Sounds like you really studied your butt off. 10-12 hours of studying a day????? That's insane. Good for you! Although I think for most people even just 2-3 hours a day would suffice. You never want to over work yourself and completely turn yourself off from studying.