Fist I should mention that LPN school for me was something I graduated from and passed those boards in 1977. And if you have not read about my CPNE experience, I used the Excelsior LPN RN bridge program to get my ASN. I took forever to finish it. In fact so long that I obtained a six month extension to be able to finish the program. Which I did finish. But it was almost 8 years from the time I started reading my first module for A&P and the time I was preparing to write my state board exam. So I had some big time content review I needed to do.
In 1977 when I studied for my LPN boards I used Saunders Review Book. It worked. Although life was very different there. We went to Indianapolis as a class and stayed at a down town fancy hotel the night before. We drank too much and slept little. Then we all got up and went to the fair grounds and all sat at long tables with pencils and papers. That was boards. Today we all go one at a time and sit at a computer for a test that we have to use palm prints and all kinds of IDs to get into and be watched by cameras and monitors.
Excelsior College provided ATI to study for the test. I attempted to use the site but it did not like my MAC computer. I am sure it was partly operator error but I could not get into using the ATI site. The information was not organized in a way that matched up with my brain and the amount of information available is overwhelming. I think a lot of nursing programs use ATI along with the courses and it would be a good asset that way. But to use it at the end to review was not working for me. So I reverted back to my tried and true Saunders Review Book with a few new twists.
I put the following onto my kindle fire:
This worked good for me because I can bring my kindle fire anywhere and it is easy to throw in a suitcase, my work bag or my purse. It is over 11,000 pages long. I purchased it in February and finished it up mid May. It is a good over view of content. But the thing with the kindle fire edition that I did not like was that the tables were not easy for me to see and there was no way to make them big enough to view easily. Luckily another nurse at work had her old copy of the review work book which has the tables and she let me borrow it. It was a bigger book than I wanted to lug around but if there was a table I wanted to get a better look at it was in there also. It looked like this:
The other thing I used was the Saunders Review App on my smart phone. I put it on my iPhone which allowed me to also have it on my IPod touch. I do not have an iPad. If I had it do over I would have purchased the droid app on my kindle fire. The iPhone and iPad are too small for me to read the small print on the app and I had very tired eyes from using it. I completed only a hundred questions a week the first several weeks I had it. Some weeks I only completed 50 questions. But the week prior to testing, after I had finished up reading the 11,000 page book, I completed 200 questions a day for the that final week. Well, my goal was 200 questions a day. I only did 100 one day but 200 all the other days that week. The one thing I suggest with the app question review is be sure and read not only the rationale for each question - even if you got the question right - but read the strategy too. The Saunders app has some bad reviews because it does not save the questions. But it scrambles them and sends them out to you different all the time. I guess I wasn't score or result oriented enough to worry about the thing saving what I was doing. It looked like this:
The other thing I did involved using my iPod in the car. I read out loud note cards I had made from the Saunders Review book onto the voice memo utility and I also read out loud study sheets I found on the face book support review pages under files along some cool stuff I found on Pinterest. I made seven audio files to listen to during my commute to work. It was a big help for lab values and that sort of wrote memory stuff that I am not good at.
On my commute home from work I listened to a book I got off my audible account. It was a book that went so fast I had to slow it down from 100% to 75% on the speed setting. And I still couldn't keep up. But I was amazed when I got to the questions on the Saunders app how much of the audio book info was in my brain. Also it is a book that was published just before the big changes on the NCLES exam in 2003 so although the content is of course correct as the facts don't change the stuff about the test itself I took with a grain of salt. It helped me a lot more than I thought when I started listening to it. It looks like this:
There were two videos that were suggested on the Facebook NCLEX-RN review support pages that really helped me. I really was struggling with pH and also with EKG strips. The following two videos cleared a lot up.
I have one final word about the test. Although we are not allowed to give out test questions or details about the test and it is well known that different people get different questions any way because the computer recalculates based on your answers what it is going to ask, I think the following statement would be allowed for me to make. I can't really say that anything I studied per say was on the test I took. It was all nursing judgement and reasoning from a knowledge base. My test shut off after 75 questions and I thought I had failed it. So when my husband brought up my active RN license on the my State Board of Nursing web site the next afternoon I said thought he had photo shopped the screen. What I took was a very hard test. Enough said.
I wish anyone that takes the NCLEX-RN success and right now my biggest challenge seems to be remembering to write that RN instead of LPN when I sign my name at work. After almost 40 years it is so automatic that the LPN sort of flows off my pen. But it is a challenge I am glad to be achieving!!
