Almost There

With only one more day to study for NCLEX, I finally finished the Kaplan QTrainers. I didn't get as many QBank questions done as I had hoped. They recommend doing all the QTrainers (1-7, which I did) and about 90% of the QBank questions. I think there's around 1300 QBank questions and I've only done 750 of them. I will do more tomorrow.

Below are my scores for Kaplan:

Diagnostic 69% (mixture of questions- taken before Kaplan course)

Readiness 69% (only passing level questions- taken at the end of the Kaplan course)

The rest of these were completed AFTER the Kaplan Course (on my own)

Q Trainer 1 63%

Q Trainer 2 76%

Q Trainer 3 62%

Q Trainer 4 69%

Q Trainer 5 74%

Q Trainer 6 67% (only passing level questions)

Q Trainer 7 72% (only passing level questions)

QBank Cumulative Performance  Score: 70%  (750 questions so far)

I'm happy with my scores. My Kaplan instructors told us the following: 

"Goal for Question Trainers 1-5 is 65%. Goal for for QTrainers 6 & 7 and all QBank tests is 60%...aim for 65!"...

"Remember that every candidate taking the NCLEX®RN examination gets 50% of their questions correct and 50% of the questions wrong. The difference between passing and failing is level of difficulty of question. If you are getting 50% of your questions correct answering passing level questions, you will pass. Passing questions are written at the application/analysis level of Blooms Taxonomy."

 All throughout my studying, I've kept a positive "I can do this" attitude. And while I've certainly gotten tired of studying, I've never felt defeated. I feel that I've prepared well and will do well and will pass. This is not a test that I have to ace. It's pass/fail  and it's adaptive in that it's designed to keep pushing you to a higher and higher level of questions. It'll be a good thing if I get a lot of the SATA questions (Select All That Apply) because those are generally considered higher-level questions and means I'm doing well enough that I'm staying in the higher level question zone. It'll also be a good thing if I get questions on topics I've never heard of - because again, these questions are likely higher level. My Kaplan scores show that I'm doing better than 50% and that's good! Lots of people post their scores at AllNurses.com and from what I've seen, my scores are comparatively high. So I am very hopeful.

On Thursday I am not planning to do any studying (the day before the test), so that means that tomorrow is my last day of studying! Woohoo!  I've completed nearly 4,000 NCLEX questions since graduation and I fully expect to top 4,000 by tomorrow (only 80 to go!).

Tomorrow morning I have my second interview. I shadowed on Monday and LOVED the unit. The staff was great and I can totally see myself working there. It will be challenging, but in a fantastic way! I'm hoping to have good news to share...possibly next week. We'll see.

And to celebrate the end of my studying, I am planning to celebrate a friend's birthday tomorrow night. I MIGHT go to the movies on Thursday evening (to do something fun and chill out) before my big test. I really don't have money to spend on this...but hey-- I've studied my butt off and need a brain-break! And then hopefully NCLEX will go well on Friday and I'll be able to get back to town to go to another birthday party that night.

Then comes the long weekend of possibly not knowing if I've passed or failed. I'm REALLY hoping that I can try the PearsonVue trick on Friday evening or Saturday morning and get the "good pop up".  Otherwise it will be Monday or Tuesday before the Virginia Board of Nursing will acknowledge my results. I cannot imagine what it was like in the "old days" when you took the written board exam over the course of several days and official results took much longer than a few weeks to arrive. The was the case for my mom in the 1960's. Yeesh.

Better get to bed -- interview in the morning!