The NCLEX is a monster of an exam but it is the final hurdle between you and a thrilling, rewarding career as a nurse. This article is an NCLEX study guide, representing the best advice from our panel of nursing educators, as well as our own research and wisdom as a team of learning optimizers. By the end of it, you will have a sophisticated suite of strategies and tools necessary to break down the enormous volume of nursing content you need to learn, and do that systematically until you're ready to crush the NCLEX!
The topics covered include:
- Only learn what really counts
- What you need to know to pass the NCLEX
- Brainscape's NCLEX flashcards: the ultimate study weapon
- Other important NCLEX study tools
- How to study far more effectively for the NCLEX
- The best time to study for the NCLEX
Ready to get started? Let’s go!
Only Learn What Really Counts
All-too-often, nursing students get overwhelmed not only with how much there is to learn but over which study guide they should invest their trust in. But with the NCLEX fast approaching, your challenge shouldn't be to memorize every single word of your 1,000+ page study guide.
This is a recipe for cognitive overload, and it’s not at all true. There’s a much smaller portion of knowledge you need to master to pass. The problem? Most NCLEX study guides don’t make it clear (or they don’t know) what that portion of knowledge is.
We're going to tell you what that is but the point to remember here is that when it comes to the NCLEX, there’s knowledge that really counts, and then there’s the superfluous rest. If you dedicate most of your time to studying those vital portions, you’ll do just fine. But if you get overwhelmed and rush around trying to memorize every single fact in that bible-sized study manual, you’ll put yourself on the fast track to burnout!
What You Need to Know to Pass the NCLEX
Okay, so what exactly DO you need to know to pass either the NCLEX Practical Nurse (PN) or Registered Nurse (RN) tests?
Well, for starters, they're almost exactly the same when it comes to content. The main difference is how they frame the test questions, and this reflects the roles of practical versus registered nurses in a hospital.
You can read more about the difference between the NCLEX RN and PN here. For the purpose of this NCLEX study guide, we'll keep our perspective broad.
The NCLEX test plan is broken up into these sections:
- Management of Care (Coordinated Care for the NCLEX PN)
- Safety & Infection Control
- Health Promotion & Maintenance
- Psychosocial Integrity
- Basic Care & Comfort
- Pharmacological & Parenteral Therapies
- Reduction of Risk Potential
- Physiological Adaptation
‘Management of Care’ or ‘Coordinated Care’ carries the greatest weight in terms of assessment, accounting for between 17 to 23% of the test. The other sections are spread out fairly evenly after that, accounting for around 10 to 12% each.
The entire test integrates the nursing process of caring, communication, documentation, and teaching. So while there are 8 sections on the test, you may be tested on the nursing process in any of these sections.
Now here's the first of many tools we recommend you use to help you focus only on what you absolutely need to know...
Brainscape's NCLEX Flashcards: The Ultimate Study Weapon
For every major section of the NCLEX, there’s a subset of knowledge you absolutely have to know and it's upon this essential core material that Brainscape's NCLEX flashcards are based. These 3,490+ smart, digital flashcards cover the most important concepts in Saunders, Kaplan, Hurst, Lippincott, HESI, Khan Academy, and other top test prep resources and providers.
The decks are aligned with the content in the sections outlined in the previous section. Because some of the test plan sections are very broad or generalized, the decks are broken down into a course format style instead. This is similar to nursing school and makes it easier to review the content.
For example: the ‘Health Promotion and Maintenance’ section includes both prenatal maternity and disease prevention for every system. However, it’s just easier to study maternity and then each adult health system separately.
Here’s the key point: within each section, some information is far more likely to be on the test than others.
In Pharmacology, there may be ten, twenty, or thirty things you could learn about each drug. Only some of these are going to be important on test day and they’re most often related to the safe use and administering of that drug.
For example, if a drug has twenty rare side effects, but only two of them are common, then make sure you know these two, because they’re likely to come up in the test. Also, this knowledge may impact majorly on a patient’s health in the future. It’s this subset of vital facts that the Brainscape NCLEX RN flashcards cover.
This practicality is what most nursing study guides miss when they try to prep students for the NCLEX. Why is this? Because most study guides are designed by academics.
These people create guides based on some sort of ideal scenario where students have all the time in the world to devote months and months to exclusive study. But this is almost never the case. Most NCLEX students have other responsibilities: part-time jobs, nursing school, or caregiving roles. They don’t need the complete academic knowledge of organic chemistry. They just need to know what material to study so they can pass the test and operate safely and effectively in the healthcare environment. The rest will come with on-the-job experience.
So if you want a study tool that breaks down the complete NCLEX test plan into a set of flashcards that are convenient and even fun to study, get Brainscape.
Other Important NCLEX Study Tools
i. Review courses
Knowing what to learn for the NCLEX is one challenge. Another is deciding which test prep or review resources to lean on (because there are many... some of which are not regulated or accredited). The review materials and services our nursing education partners recommend are:
- Saunders Comprehensive Review book
- The Hurst NCLEX Review course
- Klimek Reviews (the live, in-person review only)
- Remar Review
Other popular resources are:
- Kaplan NCLEX book and review course
- Mike Linares from SimpleNursing.com
- Sarah from RegisteredNurseRN.com
Then of course there’s NCSBN, the actual test writers. You’ll certainly get the official party line with their resources; however, they’re very much in the business of telling you to cover everything plus the kitchen sink when it comes to studying.
[For more on how to choose the best NCLEX review courses, click on the link.]
ii. Practice Exams
Another crucial study tool are NCLEX practice question, of which there are a myriad online. These aren’t regulated either so you're just as likely to come across excellent resources as you are terrible ones. In the not-so-good practice exams, some of the questions are worded badly, giving students the impression the examiner is trying to ‘trick’ them into the wrong answer. And other times some of the answers are just plain wrong!
The practice NCLEX exams we trust are:
- The NCLEX Mastery app
- The Saunders Comprehensive Review (there are practice questions in the book and online)
Another popular resource for practice questions is UWorld. This is a great product to use if you are already very strong in your knowledge of nursing content. But if you are still focused on reviewing the basics, we recommend starting elsewhere.
Be aware that some test exam companies deliberately make their tests harder than the NCLEX. In theory, it’s meant to give students confidence (if I passed this, the NCLEX will be easy!) In practice, it’s often the opposite, and students can get discouraged by how much more they need to learn. That’s why we recommend sticking to the practice exams above, as they’re a fair representation of the NCLEX.
(You'll also find some Next Generation NCLEX practice questions here.)
iii. Nursing School
Being a good nurse is different from being a top NCLEX student. Unfortunately, many nursing schools focus primarily on training you to be a good nurse, and deal with NCLEX requirements by either:
- Assigning huge amounts of reading from brick-like textbooks, or
- Doing a three-day NCLEX review course at the end of the semester. (In other words, an extended NCLEX cram session.)
Neither of these methods is very effective. Simply reading the information doesn’t mean you’ll retain it. And trying to cram material into your head at the end of a semester is largely a waste of time, as very little of it will end up in your long term memory.
The best way to address this crucial gap is to use a flashcard app to drill yourself on the content throughout nursing school and/or your review period (the months leading up to the NCLEX). And, of course, the best nursing flashcard app for the job is Brainscape!
These flashcards are a massive timesaver. They don’t cover every single iota of knowledge in the NCLEX but that’s exactly the point!
Instead, these 3,490+ smart, digital flashcards focus on the most crucial knowledge in the latest Next Gen NCLEX outline, as well as Saunders, Kaplan, Hurst, Lippincott, HESI, Khan Academy, and other top test prep resources and providers.
Additionally, you get the information in easy, well-organized, bite-sized chunks you can study anywhere: during a five-minute wait before class, on the bus, or at home after dinner. It’s all there on our app, and you can sync all your devices over the net.
Also, you may find learning the Brainscape way strangely addictive …
You’ll still need to do the normal NCLEX test prep: answering practice exam questions, reading the study guides, and going to class. However, with the Brainscape flashcards, you’ll get the most important facts into your long term memory, far ahead of time.
They’ll be there, ready to be used, when you’re actually staring down the barrel of your NCLEX test and the clock is ticking.
iv. Flashcard Creation
In addition to the pre-made NCLEX flashcards, you can also use Brainscape to make your own flashcards, either manually or using our sophisticated AI tools. This can be very useful when addressing subject areas you’re not very strong in.
The extra steps you take to make your own flashcards will force you to break down complex topics into their simplest components. This process is a powerful way to deeply understand and embed knowledge so you’ll always have it.
5. How to Study for the NCLEX More Effectively
So far we’ve covered what to study for the NCLEX (and it’s rather less than you’d think). Now we’re going to look at how to study.
Passive Versus Active Studying
In the same way that patients don’t present at the hospital with a perfect list of their symptoms, real-world study isn’t always straightforward.
For example, reading through material in a book may feel like you’re learning. It’s a great way to get an overview of what you need to learn. But it's a passive technique, and things learned passively don’t stay in your memory for long.
Passive studying may feel like you’re being productive, but it’s not really. It’s a bit like doing a pleasant stroll on the flat ground to build muscle. It’s nice, but not effective. In contrast, active studying is hard work. And it really gets knowledge into your long-term memory.
Similarly, answering multiple-choice questions may seem like a great way to practice. After all, the NCLEX uses multiple-choice, right? It’s certainly a useful revision technique. Again though, it’s not that great for putting information into your memory. This is because answering multiple-choice questions uses recognition, rather than active recall.
Recognition is just when you see a list of medications and recognize the one that’s used to decrease a fever.
Active recall is when you see the question:”‘what medication can be used to treat a fever?” And, without any clues, your brain goes and retrieves that piece of information from your memory. It’s a far more reliable way to test whether you really know something or not.
Active recall is what Brainscape flashcards use to test your knowledge. This type of learning is especially important for the dense NCLEX sections like pharmacology.
Retaining What You’ve Learned
When you have literally hundreds of these facts to remember, you need to take the most efficient path, which is doing more than just reading the study guide. Fortunately, there’s a magic ingredient to truly learn information in a time-efficient way. That ingredient is called spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition relates to how often you review new information. Getting the timing of this right gives you the most efficient way to learn and retain information. There is an optimum spacing at which to revise new facts, and Brainscape does this for you automatically behind the scenes.
In Brainscape, you rate how well you know each card, from not at all (that’s a 1) to perfectly (a 5). The algorithm then repeats the cards you don’t know far more frequently. And the ones you do know? It tests you on those just enough to ensure you retain them in your long-term memory.
Spaced repetition is especially helpful when you don’t have much time available to study. By doing a little bit, often, you get far better results than students who try to cram all their study into the week before the test.
Here’s What Effective NCLEX Studying Looks Like
To sum up how to study efficiently for the NCLEX, there are three aspects:
- Understand the topic
- Learn: get the information into your brain (memorization)
- Retain: keep your knowledge fresh
1. Understand
Read through your study guide and make sure you understand everything in it. Highlight any parts that aren’t clear, and make a note to ask your teacher or other students to clarify them until you’ve fully mastered them.
Write the key concepts down in your own words. This is an important part of both understanding and memorization. When you put something into your own words, as well as the textbook version, you’re creating an extra ‘hook’ your brain can use to retrieve the information when you need it next.
Teach someone. Teaching someone else (especially a non-nursing student) is the best way to test your knowledge and ensure you have a firm grasp of the concepts.
2. Learn
Break each topic into small, bite-sized pieces of knowledge. This is an important step to getting information into your memory. Brains don’t ‘upload’ large volumes of data in one large information dump. They store information the same way you build a house: brick by brick.
This is where the Brainscape NCLEX RN flashcards are exceptionally useful. Inside each flashcard deck, we’ve further distilled each topic into its most important individual facts and written out these facts in question-and-answer pairs on single flashcards.
In the entire set of Brainscape NCLEX classes, there are 3,400+ flashcards. However, considering we’re condensing knowledge from what would be thousands of pages and years of experience, these flashcards will save you literally days of knowledge-sorting time.
Even better, you don’t need to break open the giant textbook, figure out where you left off, or go back and review all the parts you aren’t confident about. In Brainscape, you self-assess how well you know every card you see, and our intelligent algorithm will organize your studying for you, using the principle of spaced repetition.
This keeps you in the zone of optimal learning, where just the right amount of new material is mixed with information you already know. In other words, your working memory is stretched just enough to build new knowledge scaffolding. It’s like a perfectly-paced fitness workout... for your brain.
3. Retain
When you simply read a section of the NCLEX material, and never look at it again until a week before your test, you leave yourself vulnerable to memory decay. New information stays in your short-term memory for a few hours and then fades. Even a quick review of new material will help fix it in your long term memory far more effectively.
Studying a little every day means that by exam time, your brain has had plenty of time to fit the vast catalog of NCLEX knowledge into a neatly organized library of information.
Do this, and you’ll be one of those students who aren’t frazzled and stressed to the max at test time. Instead, you’ll be quietly confident, ready to ace the NCLEX, and start a new chapter of your life!
A Final Word on Studying for the NCLEX Effectively
The world needs more qualified nurses. And it always will. They do an incredibly important job. All the way back to Florence Nightingale, Walt Whitman, and before, nurses have risked their lives to help others. They’re on the front lines caring for the sick, the in-need, and the vulnerable.
The best way to get yourself into NCLEX study mode is to remember your end goal. The NCLEX is the final hurdle for you to vault over in order to become a nurse, and with focus, determination, and some effective study, you’re sure to get there.
**NCLEX-RN® is a registered trademark of the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), which neither sponsors nor endorses this product.