5 Reasons Nursing Students Fail Exams (DON'T DO THIS!)

In this video, I'm going to walk you through five reasons why nursing students fail their exams and the simple fixes to make sure that it doesn't happen to you. Let's dive in. Here's what makes nursing school exams so brutal. They're testing you on content that your professor assumes that you already know. And if you study for it the same way that you studied last semester or in your prereqs, you are walking straight into a trap, my friend, that most nursing students don't see coming until the exam is over. So we're going to make sure that that doesn't happen to you and make sure to stick around until the end of the video because I'm going to share my three day reset strategy. That's going to be a game changer for you. Now here's mistake number one. Studying like last term is over. Because it is not. And here's what I mean by this. Oftentimes we think of a new semester as a brand new thing or a clean slate. So you've got new classes, new notebooks, highlighters, new everything. Everything's all, all shiny and new. And I love that energy. But here's the problem with this Nursing school is cumulative, my friend. That means that what you learned in fundamentals, that is going to follow you all the way through your program in med surg and beyond. It's what you learned in Farm. It's going to follow you in every class that you take. What you learned in your health assessment class, you will need to know that for literally every single clinical rotation and exam for for the rest of nursing school and the nclex. So when you put all of last semester stuff in a drawer and never look at that again, you are actually sabotaging your success. So here's the fix for this. Keep your notes organized as you go through your term and during the first week of each new term, just spend about 30ish minutes reviewing those key concepts from the previous term. So just 30 minutes. That's it. You don't need to do a whole deep dive study session, but you do need to do a quick refresher. Now mistake number two is misjudging your study time and how much time you actually have before an exam. If you tell yourself you have plenty of time, trust me when I say this, you will waste it. Ask me how I know. And then suddenly it's two days before the exam and you are in full on survival mode trying to cram everything in last minute. Again, ask me how I know. Now here's what nursing students often miss. The first few weeks of the term are total chaos. You are trying to figure out a new schedule. You have new clinical sites, and you are trying to figure out all of your new instructors, your professors, and their different teaching and lecture styles. You might also be working or taking care of your family and even trying to have some resemblance of a social life. All of that is going to eat into your study time and then before you know it, you are going to get behind and trying to play catch up, which is a huge, huge problem in nursing school because it just moves so fast. You have to stay on top of things or you can get really behind very, very quickly. Now the fix for this is to start studying for your first exam the first week of class and do this consistently so the first week. So because if you don't, my friend, here's the if you get behind on studying, boy oh boy, it will catch up to you and it will not be pretty, right? You want to stay as far ahead as you can. Now here's my 2:1:10 rule for studying in nursing school. You want to study for two hours outside of class for every hour that you are in lecture each week and then review your previous notes from the weeks prior for one hour a week and do 10 practice questions each day. I actually have a free nursing school study checklist for you with my top tips to help you help you study better for your exams. It's got everything that you need to stay on track and study smarter, not harder. So just comment checklist and I will send it right over to you now. Mistake number three and man oh man, this is a big one. Passive studying. And here's what I mean by this. There is a huge difference, huge difference between understanding something and exposure to something. Here's the thing about nursing school exams. They do not test you on whether or not you recognize information. Information. Right. They're testing you on whether you can apply it to a patient scenario that you've never seen before, maybe a priority question, all of that critical thinking. And here's where students get tripped up. They feel productive because they spent maybe four hours with their textbooks open. But if those four hours were spent passively reading or highlighting, you'd have been better off spending just one hour doing active practice questions where you're really forced to think about the answer and figure it out. Active recall beats passive review every single time because you're actually forcing yourself to think through the information and make connections and critically think about it. And that is exactly what your nursing exams are going to test you on. So here are some things you can do to practice your critical thinking in nursing school. While you're studying, you can close your notes and try to explain the concepts out loud to yourself or to someone else. You can do practice questions and make sure that you go through the rationales for why you got it right and why you got it wrong. That way you'll understand the reasoning behind it. You can teach it to someone else, or you can even write out your notes, or even draw pictures of the key points from your own memory and then check your notes after you've written it all out. Those are all really good active recall strategies. Mistake number four is ignoring the patterns on exams and how they test. There's a pattern to nursing school exams that nobody tells you about when you start nursing school. Did anyone tell you? No one told me. And once you see it, you will not be able to not see it. Here's the secret my friend. There are only four main things that you need to know to pass your nursing school exams. That's it. Four things. Most of your exam questions. Whether it's for your first med surg test or a question on the nclex. It's going to test you on one of these four categories most likely. So let's walk through them here real quick and then I'm going to give you an example to help it all. Click. Number one is the pathophysiology. What's actually happening in the body and why. This is your key critical thinking piece right here, my friend. If you don't understand the why behind what's happening, you are just memorizing random facts. And your nursing exams are not testing you on facts. They are testing you on critical thinking. So you've got to know the patho. Number two Signs and symptoms. What does this condition look like in a patient? What is the patient going to present with? Now here's your other key critical thinking point for this. You want to connect this back to the pathophysiology. So when you think about the signs and symptoms of a disorder, don't just memorize a list of them. Instead you want to think back through why they happen and what part of that patho could be causing it. Now number three nursing assessments. And this includes lab values. So what are you going to assess for or what are you going to check? What data are you going to collect? What labs are you going to draw? Now this nursing assessment is so important because you can't do nursing interventions without it. So that's the next Part number four, the nursing interventions. And this includes medications and what you will teach your patient. So what are you going to do about it? What treatments does this patient need? What meds are you expecting to give? What are the key teaching points that you need to do before your patient is discharged and goes home? These are all part of the nursing interventions category story. And again, we want to connect all of this back to the pathophysiology, because that's how critical thinking happens. Think back to the pathophysiology and what's actually happening in the patient's body and think through why those nursing interventions make sense. Patho signs and symptoms, assessments and interventions. That's it. That's the framework. Now here's an example of how you would use this as your study. And this framework is so, so important to your critical thinking in nursing school, which is why I structured all of the med surge videos inside the nursing SOS membership community this way. So when you log into the course, you'll see that it's all broken up into these four main categories. And I walk you through the critical thinking behind it all. We connect everything back to the path though. It's so important. So let me show you what I mean by this and how it all works. So let's say you're studying heart failure. So here's the high level pathophysiology of what's going on. With heart failure, the heart can't pump effectively, so blood backs up in the system. If it's left sided heart failure, it's going to back up into the lungs. If it's a right sided heart failure, blood backs up into the body. Now let's walk through the signs and symptoms. So if it's left sided heart failure, you're going to see respiratory issues like crackles in the lungs, dysfunction, near shortness of breath and coughing because that blood and that fluid, it's accumulating in the lungs. And then in right sided heart failure, you could see things like edema, weight gain, jugular venous distension and hepatomegaly because blood is backing up into the body. So there's going to be all of that swelling happening there. And so now thinking back to the patho, you're going to be checking their lung sounds, you're going to be doing daily weight checks, checking their weight, looking at their BNP level, which is testing for heart stretching. You're going to watch their intake and output and assess for edema, connect it all back to the patho. And then for your interventions, they might be getting diuretics, maybe like furosemide or maybe an ACE inhibitor for their heart. They might be on a sodium restriction to decrease that fluid. And you'll need to educate them on doing daily weight checks at home to monitor that swelling and that edema. And they'll need to be educated on when to call their doctor. So see how this all connects? It connects all back to the pathophysiology. The key to studying in nursing school is moving away from memorizing facts and making that leap to critical thinking, because that's how you're going to pass your exams, my friend. Your nursing exams and the NCLEX are not going to ask you to define heart failure or. Or even to explain what it is, but they are going to give you a patient scenario question or a case study and ask you what to assess for or what you would do first. And if you use this framework to study, you can think through the answer instead of just guessing from a list of things you memorized. So from now on, every single time you study a new condition, I want you to make sure that you hit all four of these categories. Pathophysiology, signs and symptoms, nursing assessments, which includes lab values, and the nursing interventions, which includes the medications and patient education. And if you can't think through each of those four things before your exam, for every disorder you're studying, that's where your knowledge gap is, okay? And that's what you're going to want to go back and study before you take your exam. So this, my friend, is critical thinking in action. You're not just memorizing a list of stuff. You're building this whole critical thinking framework in your brain that helps you answer any question that they can throw at you on your exams because you can think through it. And don't forget to snag that free nursing school study checklist that has my top tips to help you critically think and study better for your exams. Just comment checklist, and I will send it right over to you. And now, mistake number five. Doing it all by yourself and going it alone in nursing school. I saved this one for last because it might be the most important. Nursing school is hard. Like, really hard. And trying to do it alone makes it 10 times harder. I talk to nursing students all the time who are in survival mode. They are feeling like a fresh fraud or imposter, or they're convinced that everyone else gets it and that they're the only ones who are struggling. I know I felt that way, so I totally get it. So if that's you right now. That's how I felt too. I felt like I was drowning. I felt like everyone else knew everything and they were so confident when they walked into their exams and I was the only one struggling. But one of the amazing things God gave us is other people. And the students who pass aren't even necessarily the smartest students. They're the students who use the resources they have. They go to office hours, they get together with study groups or their study buddies, they ask questions in class, they get tutoring, they get mentoring, and they join things like the nursing SOS Membership community. So the fix for this is to find your people. And that could be a study group of just even two or three other students. Or maybe you go to office hours with your professor and you ask them questions. Or you look through your exams, or you can look for tutoring at your school. Or you can join an online program like our Nursing SOS Membership community where I can walk you through everything that you've got to know to pass your exams and pass nursing school ultimately. And then you can ask me questions and get help. So don't wait until your grades are in trouble or you're failing to get the help that you need. You want to build your support system now before you get into trouble. And you'll be much more set up for success that way. Now here's where the rubber meets the road in nursing school when you only have a few days before the exam. So here's your 72 hour study reset strategy. This is your study plan for the 72 hours before your exam. So you can transition from that intense mode of studying to that long term memory and that critical thinking mode that you're going to want to be in for your exam. So let's walk through it day by day. So three days before your exam is your studying peak. This is your last window of time for that intense studying and focus. Your main goal here is to figure out any knowledge gaps that you have and fix them. And there's a few ways that I recommend that you do this. Number one, you'll want to do at least 50 NCLEX style practice questions specifically on your exam topics. But this is super important. They've got to be specific to your exam topics. There's a lot of practice question apps and resources out there that will vary the questions. And unless you're studying for a comprehensive final, that's not what you want. You want to focus on doing the practice questions for the specific topics that you're studying because those are the Ones that are going to show up on your exams. And here's the key. For practice questions, you want to make sure that you actually read the rationales. Because that why behind the answer is where the real learning happens. If you miss a question, do not beat yourself up, okay? Please, please, please don't beat yourself up. Just move on. Instead, make sure to look up the pathophysiology or the nursing interventions right away while it's fresh on your mind, because that is how you're going to remember it for your exam. So when you understand the why behind it and the critical thinking, like we talked about earlier, that is where the magic happens. And number two, I want you to do something called the teach back method. Maybe you've heard about this in nursing school so far. This is where you'll pick one of the toughest topics that you're learning about and you'll teach it out loud to someone else, or even to your dog or your cat or a stuffed animal, whatever. The point is that you want to be able to clearly teach the concept well to someone else. So that's how you're going to know that you're prepared for your exam when you can clearly and confidently teach it to someone else. And number three, please, please, please do not sacrifice your sleep during this time. You might feel productive pulling an all nighter and studying, but your brain isn't actually retaining what you're cramming in. You need that sleep in order to retain all that info and to be ready for your exam. And then when you're 48 hours to about 24 hours out from taking your exam, this is when you'll want to transition to low intensity Mode. At the 48 hour mark, you'll want to stop the hard studying and you want to shift to just refining what you already know and making sure that you don't forget it. So for this you'll want to focus only on the priority things like the key nursing interventions, the key lab values, drug antidotes and life threatening side effects or life threatening symptoms or complications. These are the absolute must know things for your exams. And if you're a nursing SOS member, you can use the study guides and the cheat sheets that I have for you inside the NMC so that you'll have all the key points that you need. The other thing you'll want to do is to review test taking strategies like the ones that I share here in this video and in this video video. So you've got to know how to prioritize patient care so you can get those priority questions right on your exams. You've also got to understand how the exams are written so you can pick the correct answer. There's a system for it. Okay, so definitely check those videos out. After you watch this video, they'll walk you through all of that. And here's the thing. The name of the game in nursing school is consistency. Not cramming. In those 24 to 48 hours before your exam, you don't want to go through new chapters or learn new concepts. By now, if you've followed our steps in our nursing school study system and you've been studying a little bit every single day leading up to your exam, then the day or two before that is just a brain break. It's a refresher for you. So learning new information this close to an exam can just make you panic and it will just jumble up all the other info that you've learned so far. So remember, consistency beats cramming every time. And then the day before your exam, that's when you'll want to switch from that critical thinking and your review mode to your de stress mode. A lot of successful nursing students actually stop studying entirely in the 24 hours before the exam. You may have heard the phrase you either know it or you don't. I've heard that maybe you have too, and I think there's a lot to that. I know from my personal experience. The more time that I spent studying so close to the exam, the more anxious I got for that exam. So cramming as much studying in as possible just increases our anxiety and it can hurt your grade. So remember our rule, consistency over cramming. So instead of studying, you'll focus on exam logistics. Make sure you have everything in your bag and it's all packed and ready to go. You'll need your id, most likely snacks, water. Make sure you've got some comfortable clothes to wear and make sure that you set your alarm so you don't accidentally sleep in. You just want to get rid of every single possible source of morning stress so you can walk into your exam as calm and as focused as you can. This is also the most critical night of sleep in this entire 72 hour window. So even if that means napping the day before, go for it. Get enough sleep before your exam to make sure that you are mentally prepared. And then when it's the morning of your exam, you want to protect your headspace and your confidence as much as possible. Make sure to eat a good breakfast and make sure to drink plenty of water. Then spend about 15 to 20 minutes reviewing the test taking strategies that we just just talked about a little bit earlier. Not the content, just those NCLEX test taking strategies. Review the ABCs, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and the difference between assess and implement questions. This will help get your critical thinking juices flowing for your exam. And man, this one is so important. I've said it a gazillion times and I will keep saying it. My friend, do not sit near your classmates outside the exam room. Seriously, everyone brings the nervous vibes, right? And you do not need that before you walk into your exam. So what I did in nursing school is I would show up right on time or even slightly late by just like 30 seconds or a minute. Like not enough to get into trouble or anything, but it was long enough that everyone else was already sitting at their computer computer. So you can just stay in your own little quiet bubble and your own headspace when you walk into the exam. And honestly, exams are the biggest thing that nursing students worry about. So be sure to check out this video here where I walk you through the absolute must know test taking strategies that you'll want to review before every exam. And if this video helped you, hit that like button and leave a comment below to let me know. All of that tells YouTube to show this video to more nursing students who need it. And I am on a mission here to help as many nursing students as possible pass nursing school. And don't forget to snag your free Nursing School Study checklist that has my best tips to help you critically think and study better for your exams. Just comment checklist below and I'll send it over to you. Or you can click the link in the description below to snag it. And of course hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell so you never miss a video. And as always my friend, go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I will see you over there in that next video.