The best NCLEX guide is subjective, but I firmly feel that you need to know the strategy of taking the NCLEX before you spend hours reviewing example questions.
When I think back on all the test strategy guides and NCLEX questions that I reviewed for the nursing boards, I can think of no single piece of literature that helped me more than Saunders Strategies for Test Success: Passing Nursing School and the NCLEX Exam.
Quite frankly, my one mistake with buying this book is that I didn’t do it sooner. I spent most of nursing school having the most terrible time with the questions because I just couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of “Yes, all the answers are correct, but which is the most correct.” Nursing school is a time when tests change from 1 right answer in a series of wrong, to one most-right answer. It requires critical thinking and a keen understanding of how NCLEX test questions are structured. While I was in nursing school I simply thought the instructors were gaining a great amount of joy from making seemingly impossible to answer questions.
Had I realized from the very beginning that test sin nursing school were written in a very similar manner to the questions that were on the NCLEX, I would have started studying test taking guides like this a much earlier.
My favorite thing about this strategy guide is it really helps you get to the meat of the question and make narrow down the correct answer, even if you aren’t completely comfortable with the material being covered with the question.
I am fairly confident that if I had not read this book, I would not have passed the NCLEX with 75 questions on the first try.
You can pick up this NCLEX test strategy guide up on Amazon for less than $30.
Saunders 2018-2019 Strategies for Test Success: Passing Nursing School and the NCLEX Exam
See also:
I have the 2nd edition of the Saunders strategy guide. I am wondering if there is a huge difference between it and the newer 3rd edition? Do you have any idea?
I’m sure it would be fairly close.
cageaquarium I really hate to hear that you decided not to pursue nursing, but I know it is night right for everyone.
I struggled with answering the test questions in nursing school and it had a lot to do with the “most right” answer rule. I do understand why this is the case. When you are taking care of a patient there you make decisions in real time and even though you could decide to fluff the pillow when the patients not breathing and it wouldn’t be the worst thing you could do it’s not he most appropriate thing to do.
I will say that when I read the NCLEX guide referenced above I was able to decipher the questions much more easily and I really wished that I had had it earlier in school. 🙂
Are you enjoying health information technology? I currently work as an informatics nurse and much prefer the ability to be analytical and solve bigger issues where there is almost always one real correct answer. 🙂
I ended up dropping Nursing School because I failed my first semester of tests. I felt pretty dumb until I switched gears and goals and went into health information technology. I had to take Pathology for it and in a class of 8 people I was making the highest grade with next to no studying (my grade was 94ish percent and the class average was 72ish). I was just happy to be going back to hard science work with right and wrong answers.
I still sort of look at that “most right” thing with bafflement. As long as you have a right answer, who cares about the most right? Right is right. That view is probably what makes it good I switched career goals though haha
TheNerdyNurse FarFromCamelot …review books have great tips n guidelines tho. Dont mean to scare… good luck.
ReggieTwit2010 FarFromCamelot it can be
TheNerdyNurse FarFromCamelot ..the exam
ReggieTwit2010 FarFromCamelot the book or the nclex itself?
FarFromCamelot TheNerdyNurse — NCLEX too subjective.