In this recorded tutor call, Christina Rafano answers a common student question submitted through the Nursing SOS Membership Community (NMC): what to do when the material studied or read does not appear on a nursing school exam. She explains that reading the entire textbook is counter‑productive and advises students to focus only on the sections their instructors emphasize during lectures. After class, she recommends using the NMC resources—topic‑specific videos, study guides, and flashcards—to reinforce those lecture topics. Christina warns against binge‑watching all community content or trying to master every textbook detail, as this leads to information overload and fragmented knowledge. She emphasizes the need to constrain study scope, review targeted materials, and apply critical thinking. To support deeper learning, she points students to two NMC videos: one on the DRC critical‑thinking model and another on the Four Core Method study process, both designed to help students connect concepts and answer exam questions effectively.
What do you do?
If nothing that you studied or read.
Was on your nursing school exam, what do you do then?
In this video, we are going to talk all about that. So this was actually a question that was submitted for our live tutor call.
Inside the Nursing SOS membership community.
And I wanted to share it with you here on YouTube because it is such a common question and I hope that my answer helps a whole lot students. So I hope it helps you today. This is the recording of that tutor call that I did just a couple weeks ago inside the nmc. So hit that subscribe button and click.
The notification bell and let's dive in. This is a long question. Let me see if I can paraphrase this. I am struggling to be on top of my coursework and exams. I am mainly concerned about my exams. So my question is, how do I get the most out of nursing SOS to ace my exams? I am currently in Fundamentals and I just took my first exam and didn't do as well as I thought I did due to the fact that most everything they taught me on wasn't from the chapters I read. Yes, that's so common. I'd like to get some feedback on what I should focus on and how to study so I can ace my exams or at least pass. Love this question. This is so, so good. Okay, first off, I love this question because you're like, this is absolutely so common. I get this question all the time in some way, shape or form. Like, Christina, what was on my exam is not what I read in the book. Okay? What was on my exam is not what I thought was going to be on the exam. And it is just so common because you're going to hear it from nursing instructors all of the time. Read the textbook. Right? You hear that all the time from them. Read the textbook. And I'm here to tell you, please don't read the entire textbook. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but here's what I would do. Here's my advice, here's what I did in nursing school. This is what I tell all nursing students, okay? This is the advice. Focus on reading the sections of the book that your instructors talk about in class, all right? You've got to focus your study time to the things that were talked about in class. Because if you are reading the book just for the sake of reading the book, my friend, you are going to waste a whole lot of time. You are going to be so stressed and overwhelmed because it's so much information. That's just how it is. You cannot. Well, you could, but you wouldn't get sleep. But you cannot read everything in the textbook. It just will not work. You will never be able to sleep. You will never be able to do anything else other than read your textbooks. You will never be able to critically think or do practice questions or really actually study it, to understand it. Right? If you're just spending all your time reading for the sake of reading, that's not what we want to do. Okay? So focus on studying the sections of the book that your instructors talk about in class. That's how we do it. Okay? So now here's how to use the NMC with that. Okay? So when you are, when you're in lecture class, you've got your notes, like whatever slides they give you, whatever modules they give you, whatever they give you, okay? You've got those notes and you're taking notes in class. And then afterwards, after class, come home, watch the videos inside the NMC that corresponds respond to the topics you covered in class. Does that make sense? So if you covered heart failure in class, well, then come on home, pull up the nmc, the Nursing Assistant membership community. Go into your dashboard, click on the heart failure course. Okay? I've got a whole series on heart failure for you. All right? It's all in there. So we've got study guides, we're releasing flashcards. All the videos are there for you. It's all there for you. That will give you the key points for your exam. So that's how you review. Okay? But here's what I don't want you to do. I do not want you to read everything in the book. I don't want you to binge all the videos inside the NMC because there are so many videos for you. We cannot binge everything inside the community because it's not going to be helpful for you. You're going to have to keep focus, keep focused on the people, things, the topics that you're actually studying. If you try to binge everything, that's going to be too overwhelming. You're not going to be focused enough and you're not going to do as well on your exam as you found. Right? If you're trying to read everything in the textbook, you're just. You cannot retain all that info. So we have to. What's the word? Constrain. We need to constrain how we study. Okay? Rein it in. It seems counterintuitive, I know, because you want to know everything about everything about everything. And trust me, I did this too when I started nursing School, I wanted to know everything about everything, about everything, like jazz, I just love it. Like I love science, I love nursing, I love it all. So I wanted to know it all. But the problem is if you read everything, watch everything, do all the things, you get to your exam and you're, you have so much, so much fragmented info in your brain that you can't, you, you haven't given yourself the time or the space to actually critically think about it, to actually understand it, and to be able to apply it to a nursing exam question. So we don't want to do fragmented information. We don't want to just binge and overwhelm ourselves with random information. What we want to do is focus on studying the topics that your instructors talked about, including class. Okay? Watch those videos, download the study guides that I have for you, download the flashcard that I have for you for whatever topic you're studying, those things, review those things and study it and then you can be able to apply it. So actually inside the study course, inside the nmc, definitely check out. There's two videos to check out that would be really, really helpful for you. I've got a video on the DRC critical thinking model, which is how to critically think in nursing school. So it's going to help you critically think about the topics that you're studying about. I also have the four core method study process in there. So it walks you through the four key things to study and how to connect the dots between those things. So those two videos are going to help you so, so much. So definitely check those out inside the NMC2.
So I hope that tutor call was helpful for you. If you want more tutor calls like this and little sneak peeks behind the scenes inside the nmc, comment below, let me know. I would love to hear from you, your thoughts on that. And of course, studying in nursing school starts with taking great notes in class. So click on this video here and I'm going to walk you through my note taking system for how I took really, really good notes in class to help me then study for my exams and pass them. So click on that video. I hope that helps you and as always, my friend, go become the nurse that God created only you to be. And I'll see you over there in that next video.
