Let’s talk about how to take questions during nursing school and how to prepare for the NCLEX.
I just got this review sent over to me from Cindy, one of our support agents here at NURSING.com. It was a review from someone who just passed the NCLEX. And here’s what they say.I want to tell you that the NPQ (NURSING.com question bank) have been the closest I have ever seen to the NCLEX. I’m super impressed and really enjoying the program. Tell the staff, I am very appreciative of them and their hard work. I can’t wait to send the email saying I passed.
We have spent so much time curating and creating our NCLEX questions.
In fact, every single question on NURSING.com was written by an NCSBN trained question writer, the NCSBN is who administers the NCLEX, Every single question is written by someone who’s gone through NCSBN training to write questions as closely as possible to what you’re going to see on the NCLEX.
So I want you to go over to NUSING.com.com and take some questions today.
Okay. Now, how should you take these questions?
Well, once you’re in NURSING.com, if you go to practice questions, you’re going to be taken to what is called the NPQ, this is nursing practice questions. Within NPQ you have the ability to create highly customized practice tests.
You can choose from over 6,000 practice questions, you can also view your performance and your performance is broken down into 21 different categories. It gives you a global rank. It tells your best and worst categories, and how many you’ve taken.
It kind of shows you your progress in different nursing categories and on the NCLEX categories. Those things like reduction of risk, potential safety and infection, psychosocial integrity, all those things, but then also in the nursing categories like GIGU, musculoskeletal, pharmacology, prioritization delegation. So you can see very easily how you’re doing, and it gives you a very visual graph of how you’re doing. And you can also view past quizzes.
So I want to get into how you should take practice questions.
The first thing that I would do if I was preparing for NCLEX, let’s talk about that first. The first thing that I would do if I was preparing for NCLEX is:
I would take practice tests with 50 random questions. So I would select 50 questions and I would select them in just random categories and then I would take those tests, I would do that about every day, once or twice 50 questions. So maybe 100-150 questions a day.
And what that’s going to do is that’s still going to start feeding my performance. So then after I’ve done that three or four times, I would have multiple hundred questions, I would be able to go into my performance and see where I’m scoring the best and where I’m scoring the worst with this.
Now this is where I want you to be careful what a lot of times we do as humans, we want to see ourselves doing well. Right? And so we’ll continue to do those things we’re really good at, and we’ll avoid those things we’re not so great at.
Once I’ve done this for hundreds of questions, maybe three, 400 questions, even just 200 enough to kind of feed the algorithm a little bit. I would go in and I would look at my performance and I would say, okay, and I’m looking at mine right now.
I would say, nero I’m doing best in and ENT I’m doing worst in. So once I know that, okay. And again, it’s going to be very visual.
In neuro I got 43% of questions right, and nose and throat I got zero. So I’d say, okay, those categories that I’m doing the worst in, have all reds. I want to start taking questions just in those categories. So then I’m going to go focus and just take questions in those categories with less focus on those areas that I’m doing well, what you would also want to do is then go into those courses.
So it says I’m doing my worst in ear, nose and throat. I want to go back into the ear, nose and throat course and just review those lessons really quick.
Remember, each lesson is five to 10 minutes, want to review a bunch of those lessons, and then I’m going to come back in and take questions again.
10 to 20 questions, questions in those different categories where I was doing worse. Now, as I do that, I should start seeing all my category percentages increase.
What we suggest on NPQ within nursing.com is that you’re scoring about 50 to 60% on different categories. If you’re scoring 50 to 60%, we’re seeing people do with that ranking doing best on the in clicks. If you can get all of your nursing categories up to 50 or 60%, your chances of passing the NCLEX are incredibly high and they start to increase as you improve. So again, the first thing you do is go in and take a bunch of random questions, I’d take several hundred. So you can see some performance stats. Once you have those performance stats, pull out those areas that you’re doing the worst in and go and review those courses, then come back and take questions just in those areas.
Then I would take some random questions, again, another 50 questions just random and see how I’m doing at that point. Now it’s very possible that you start to do much, much, much better because you’re lifting up those weakest areas. And you can see that through your past quizzes. If you go to your past quizzes, it will have a chronological order of all your past quizzes showing you all the categories that you tested in and your score. You can choose to continue questions or quizzes that you didn’t finish, or you can review. Now, I want to tell you about rationales inside nursing.com.
Rationales inside NURSING.com are like a lesson on their own. In fact, they include video lessons, Cheatsheets, and a rationale is written for each answer option. So it tells you why the correct answer was correct, and it tells you why each wrong answer was wrong.
And get this one other thing that we do is we allow you to tell us if a question’s good or bad, think about that in nursing school. Have you ever been able to just tell your professor questions are bad?
And here’s why I don’t like it. You can do that with nursing.com and our team of question writers, review those every single day.
What I want you to do as you’re preparing for nursing school, and you could do this also, if you’re just in like cardiac, I would take 25 random questions on cardiac and review those rationales. That’s where a lot of the learning occurs. So to recap, I would go in and take out a bunch of random questions, 50 questions quizzes, maybe five, four of them, a couple hundred questions, and that’s going to feed your performance. Then you need to go into those categories where you’re doing the worst in and watch those videos.
Again, take more questions there again, and really study the rationales. And remember the rationales have paragraphs, you know, for which answer is right or why each answer is wrong. They also have videos and they also have cheat sheets. So you can really dig into these rationales and a lot of your learning can occur right there. That learning starts on submit.
Now, if you want to dig in even deeper, you can, inside nursing.com, you can go into advanced filtering to create even more advanced quizzes. So you can view just select all that apply questions, alternate format questions, just multiple choice. You can do unanswered questions, incorrect or all. And you could even view by question difficulty, whether it was an easy, you maybe want to just take easy questions. So if I’m a fundamental student, you know, I might select, I want to do nursing categories, fundamentals, and I want to take easy I’m first semester.
So, you know, that would be best for me. Maybe you’re doing really well on all the easy ones.
QOD 015: Peds growth and dev (Health promotion and maintenance)
So I just want to take really, really hard questions, but I want to take them in all categories. And I want them to just be select all that apply. So you can really drill down and filter how it is that you study. But where I think some people fall is they start looking at questions on too many platforms. And if you do that, you’re managing multiple apps for many multiple subscriptions. What I want you to do on nursing.com is use the question bank to feed what you study. And a lot of your studying can happen all in one place. Think about that, your question studying, reviewing your rationales, reviewing cheat sheets, reviewing quiz, lessons can all happen in one place.
And show your data that you’re getting in your practice questions can fuel the lessons that you watch. And if you’re doing really, really, really poorly in an area, I want you to dig into the video. I want you to dig into the cheat sheets. I want you to dig into the outlines in the lessons. It’s all right there in one place. So I highly suggest that you do that. If you’re already a member of nursing.com, that’s how I would suggest using it. Again, you should be scoring 50 to 60%. That’s going to give you a really great opportunity and chance to pass the NCLEX. If you aren’t a member yet, go over and start the trial and test out the question bank, use some of the advanced filtering read the rationale.
When I was studying for the NCLEX. Most of my learning happened in the rationales on questions I missed. If I got a question right, I moved on, if I got a question wrong, that’s where I slowed down, read the rationale and kind of kept a note of categories that I was missing. Well, you don’t have to do that anymore.
That’s what I had to do back in 2007. You don’t have to do that anymore because we’re tracking all those areas where you’re doing well in and all those areas where you’re doing poorly in and that’s individual to you. So now you can really focus your studies super easily on reviewing those past quizzes, looking at those rationales, reviewing those lessons, reviewing those cheat sheets, or going back into the course itself, right there in the same platform and digging deeper into that stuff. So that’s how I would suggest doing it.
Starting with those couple hundred questions, splitting it up into like a couple 50 question quizzes. And then that’s going to give you an idea of where to focus your studies, then making sure that you’re spending a lot of time in those rationales. You guys, you can do this. Okay. I know right now, even more so than ever It’s a little bit more scary than normal, but don’t let that confuse you.
Don’t let that drive you to lose focus on your studies, you guys can succeed and you can pass.
We love you guys now go out and be your best self today.
Happy nursing!
