Dose Calc Study Plan: Pass Your Exam in 7 Days

There's a reason super smart nursing students fail their first dose calc exam in nursing school, and it's not the math. And by the end of this video, you are gonna know exactly what it is, and you're gonna have a 7-day study plan to make sure that it doesn't happen to you. So hit that subscribe button and click the notification bell, and let's dive in. Hey there, my friend. My name is Christina Rafano from nursingsos.com, and helping nursing students pass their dose calc exam is hands down one of my favorite things to teach. I struggled so much with dose calc when I started nursing school, and I'm going to share exactly what I changed in order to pass, and how you can do it too. And be sure to stick around until the end of the video, because I have one little memory trick that saved me and so many other nursing students from getting the answers wrong. It's a big deal. Now, I am begging you, my friend, begging you, to start studying dose calc now. Because here's the thing: you are going to have a dose calc exam within the first 2 weeks of your program in most nursing programs, and you have to pass it. And not just pass it, you have to get a 100%, literally a 100% on the dose calc exam in order to stay in the program. Now, if your school only requires you to get a 90% on the dose calc exam, my friend, please do not come down in the comment section and get on my case about it. Just be blessed, okay? And know that most nursing programs require a 100%. That's the standard. But here's where most nursing students get wrong, okay? They wait until nursing school starts to learn dose calc, and once nursing school starts, my friend, it is a fire hose. The information that you have to learn in those first few weeks of the term, it is insane, and you will be in survival mode almost overnight. So if you can get even just one thing checked off your list and off your plate before the first day of nursing school, like dose calc, you will walk in way ahead of the game. And the thing about dose calc is that it is not just about your first term or the first weeks of nursing school. It's gonna follow you all the way through your nursing program and on the NCLEX. You are gonna see it show up all the time. So learning it well now and just really getting it down, it's gonna save you so much stress and headache later. Now, day 1 of your study plan, we're going to change how you think about dose calc forever. This is gonna be awesome. So day 1 is all about getting the method down. Now, here's where most nursing students— and I mean like, nearly all nursing students— get wrong about dose calc. They try to learn formulas. You've heard of the desired over have formula. That's definitely the most common one, and there are others that your school might use. And the thing is, for simple dose calc problems, things like tablets, or things that you're just plugging in maybe a couple of numbers, or maybe just one conversion, that formula is going to work just fine in those situations. But the minute you get to the hard problems like IV calculations, heparin, Pitocin, weight-based pediatric calculations— forget about it, my friend. Those formulas, they're going to fall apart on you, and you do not want to be in your med-surg exam wondering which formula to use or getting worried that it's going to break on you. That's why the only method I teach is dimensional dimensional analysis, and some people call this the railroad track method. It kind of looks like railroad tracks. It's amazing. You have one system to follow for every single problem, and you will get it right every single time. Now I'm going to show you how. Now your order goes on the left-hand side of your paper. Your conversions go in the middle of your paper, and what you need to end up with goes on the right-hand side of your paper. Now the magical part about all this is that the units cancel out. So you can physically not go wrong on this, you will get the correct answer if you set it all up correctly. And don't worry, my friend, I'm going to help you master this. So write this down: master the method first, and the problems get easy. Okay, so I'm going to link my full dimensional analysis video right here for you. And that is the one that you're going to want to check out and go through next. Now, day 2 of your dose calc study plan. This is the one thing that nursing students really don't realize until the day of their exam. But by then, it's already too late. So we're gonna fix it today. You've got to have your conversions down. And the thing that throws so many nursing students off is that your school is not going to give these conversion factors to you on the exam. You have to walk into your exam on test day and already have them memorized. So if you don't already know them, you're gonna be behind. You are going to go into your exam and be struggling, and we do not want that. We want you to pass. So you've got to know your conversions. So today, on day 2 of your study plan, we are doing flashcards. All right, now you can either snag the flashcards from my shop or you can make your own flashcards, but they have to include all of the must-know conversions that you need to know for your exam. If you miss one, you can miss questions on your test, and that is absolutely not what we want. And to make this process way easier for you, I actually have a free dose calc cheat sheet with every single conversion that you need to know all in one place. So just comment the word "dose calc" below and I'm going to send that right over to you. And then in day 3 of your dose calc study plan, this is where things really start to get real. In day 3 of the study plan, you are going to run through some simple problems. All right, this is where we test it all. I'm talking PO meds and tablets. So let's run through my 6-step dose calc system real quick so you know exactly what I'm talking about, and then I'm going to show you how to put it all into action with some real-life problems. So step number 1 is to figure out what the question is actually asking you for. What do you need to end up with at the end? You are gonna write that on the far right-hand side of your paper, and do not skip this part, my friend, because sometimes a question looks like it's asking you for one thing, but it's really asking you for something else. So you don't want to be solving the entire problem and end up with the wrong answer at the end just because you misread the question and you were solving for the wrong thing. And step number 2 is: What did the prescriber order? So that is going to go on the left-hand side of your paper. All right, what does the order say? Now step number 3 is: What conversions do you need to use, or which conversions do you need to use, in order to get from what was ordered to what the question is actually asking you for? Now step number 4 is to solve the problem. All we're doing here is we're going to multiply across the top, multiply across the bottom, and then divide those two numbers. And now step number 5 is to write your answer appropriately. We're going to talk about this in just a minute in more detail. And then step number 6 is to check your work. Now, to help you master these steps and put it all into practice with real dose calc questions, check out this video right here where I walk you through all of it. So step by step. Nursing students rave about our dose calc videos, so I think this one is going to be so helpful for you. So here in Day 3 of your dose calc study plan, you'll want to go through 10 simple tablet problems, following these exact steps. Now the goal here isn't to get super fast at it, alright? Your goal is to help build the muscle memory so these steps can be more automatic for you, so by the time you get to your exam, you don't even have to really think about it. You know the steps, you can follow the steps for every single question and get it right. And for day 4, I want to warn you right now, this is the day that will trip you up even if you get all the math correctly. So this is huge. I get a lot of questions about this one. All right, so day 4 is rounding. So first thing, every single time you get an answer, look at what the question is asking you to round to. So is it a whole number? Are they wanting tenths or hundredths? Those alarm bells really should be going off in your brain, okay, when you see those questions. Because if they ask for a whole number and then you leave a decimal, or if they ask for tenths and you give them hundredths, then you could get the question marked wrong even though your actual answer was correct. You just rounded wrong, or maybe you added a decimal when you shouldn't have. So here's the rounding rule that you've got to know. If it's 5 and above, you round up. If it's 4 and below, you round down. And if they want a whole number, and let's say you get 3.5, then you round up to 4. If you get 3.4, you round down to 3. Now, I've had times on my dose calc exams where I'm literally shaking because I was so nervous. So these are definitely things that you want to master and make it second nature beforehand so so that you don't accidentally miss it and get the question wrong on the real exam. And then we have the rules for zeros. Now you can remember the phrase, "Nurses are leaders, not followers." So that means that you will always include a leading zero, but never a trailing zero. And here's why this matters so much. Let's say your answer comes out to 0.5 milliliters. Well, you're not going to write it as 0.5, because that little decimal can get lost somewhere, and it's very, very easy for a nurse to miss that, and there's a huge difference between 0.5 of a medication and 5, right? So if you add that leading zero to make it 0.5, then that way the decimal never really gets lost. That zero would make the other nurse stop and question it and do a double check if they didn't see that decimal. It would just be zero five. And then again, on the flip side, you never add a trailing zero. So you would not write 5.0, because if the decimal gets lost, now it looks like 50, right? That would not be good. So leading zeros are a good thing, trailing zeros are a bad thing. Okay, nurses are leaders, not followers. Now there's a huge rule for decimal places that you've got to know too, and we're going to talk about that one in just a minute. So, so far we have the method, we've got the conversions, we know the 6 steps, and we've got our rounding rules. So now, we're going to level up. In day number 5, we're going to jump into IV flow rates in multi-step problems. I'm talking about drops per minute, milliliters per hour, and problems with 2 or 3 or more conversions stacked into one question. This is where things get real. So these types of problems, like IV drip rates, heparin, Pitocin, weight-based calculations— these are all things that are going to break on you when you use the traditional formulas. But when you set up the 6-step process like we talked about, you've got all the conversions set up, the units cancel out, you follow the steps, and you'll get the answer right. It is so, so simple and amazing. Now, a couple of really quick important things for you to know here. When a question asks you about macro drip tubing, the drip factor will be given to you on the test. So it could be a drop factor of 10, 15 or 20 drops per milliliter. But if they're talking about microdrip tubing, that is always 60 drops per milliliter. And sometimes they won't even tell you that on the test, okay? It's just 60. You have to know that that's 60 drops per milliliter. So microdrip tubing is always 60 drops per milliliter, but macrodrip tubing could be 10, 15, or 20 drops per milliliter. And another really important thing for you to know is that anytime you are calculating drip rates and drops per minute, you always round to a whole number because you can't give a fraction of a drop in a chamber, right? It's not like you can just count a fraction of a drop as it's coming out of the drip chamber. You can't count a tenth or a half. It just— Right. Doesn't work that way. So we're going to round up to the nearest whole number when we are counting drops per minute. Now, on Day 6, we're going to take everything you've learned so far and we're going to stress test it. Because knowing the system and being able to do it when you are under pressure and actually taking the test, those are two very different things. Now, to master IV problems, click on this video here and I'm going to walk you through all of it. Now, day 6 is where we get practice, okay? We're going to do different types of problems like PO meds, IV, heparin, whatever types of problems that you have coming up on your exam. That's what you're going to want to focus on. So whatever types of questions your program is requiring you to know for this test that you have coming up, that's what you're going to want to focus on here in day 6. And if your program times you during your test, you are gonna wanna time yourself at home too. So that way you can know for sure that you know them well enough to do it in the right time that's required. Because even if you're getting all the questions correct, but you run out of time, you're still gonna get them marked wrong if you don't have time to complete them on the test. And here on day 6, you wanna make sure that you are actually doing step number 6 of this process and that you are rechecking your work. And here's why this is so important. Let me tell you a personal story here real quick. I had a Doscock exam in my second term of nursing school. Well, we had one every term in nursing school, but this one that I'm talking about was during my second term. And I was so sick, like totally sick, totally miserable. I had a super bad headache. I had, uh, couldn't think straight. I had like stuffy nose, sore throat, all the things. And I still had to go take this test. But I got in there, I followed the 6-step process. I knew my conversions, I knew how to set things up, and I passed. So that is really the beauty of following this 6-step process. You just follow it step by step, and it's gonna guide you through the whole thing. And double-checking your work at the end is a huge part of it because you will be shocked, my friend, at how often you find that you miss something, or maybe a unit didn't cancel out quite right, or you rounded wrong. Mm-hmm. Or you put the decimal in the wrong place, if you don't catch those things, you could still get the question marked wrong. So you always want to double check your work. And practice makes perfect. So day number 7 is your big practice day, and this is huge because you have to have this stuff really on autopilot so that you won't miss any questions on the exam and you can complete the entire DoseCalc test within whatever time frame that they give you. —so click on this video right here and I'm going to walk you through a bunch of different practice problems so you can master it. And comment "dosecalc" below to snag my free dose calc cheat sheet, or you can grab it in the link below in the description. And of course, if you liked this video, hit that like button, share it with your friends who also need some more help with nursing school, and write "love" in the comments below because that's just what we do here on my channel. All of those things really help to tell YouTube to share this video with more nursing students who need it, and I am on a mission here to help as many nursing students pass nursing school and the NCLEX as I can. 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. Bye!