Kaplan Nursing School Entrance Exam

Yikes! It's been on my mind for the last month and the day has finally come and gone - the day that I took the Kaplan Nursing School Entrance Exam (when you put it in all caps like that it makes it look very official and very scary :) ).

This is the picture I call: The door to my future. Here is where I sat as I waited for the door to open to I could go in and take the test.

Back story: I've been thinking about going to nursing school for a while now. I thought about it the first time I was in college and then again after I became a stay at home mom and it really came to the forefront when my brother in law decided to take his pre-reqs and go to nursing school. So a year ago I started taking a couple of pre-reqs that I would need in order to be able to apply for nursing school. I took A&P I last fall, A&P II and Developmental Psychology this past spring, Speech over the Maymester, and am currently finishing up my last pre-req, computers. I applied for nursing school last month and received a letter stating that I had made the first cut and was invited to take the nursing school entrance exam.

My test day: Wednesday, June 29th at 1 p.m. in Room 518.

I started studying for the test last week using a Kaplan study guide (which ended up being useless), the Little, Brown Book to study for grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, and all of my Anatomy and Physiology notes from the last two semesters.

The test consisted of 91 questions divided into four sections: Reading Comprehension, Math, Writing/Grammar, and Science. It was an online test (I hate online tests!) and each section was timed.

I showed up around 12:30pm as prepared as possible and I was so nervous.

I'm pretty good at taking tests though so I knew that once I got into it that my nerves would calm down a bit :) I got logged in and started the reading comprehension part of the test and 2 hours later emerged with an overall test score of 87% and a critical thinking score of 88%. My individual scores were Reading 95, Math 89, Writing 86, and Science 75. From what I hear from others about this test those are really good scores. The nursing school will post score cut offs for final admission on Friday afternoon so I'm hoping for the best!


Kaplan Test Info:

Reading Comprehension: Kaplan study guide was good practice for this. There were long passages to read with 3-5 questions per passage.

Math: SUPER easy. All fractions (add, subtract, multiply, divide), percentage conversions, percentage calculations, and a couple of nursing dosage calculations (given this much medicine at this rate of flow, how many minutes should you give this medicine if patient needs to receive this amount)

Writing/Grammar: Long passages to read just like the reading comprehension. It asked questions like: look at sentences 4, 7, 9, 13 - which one has a subject/verb that do not agree or which of the following sentences has the comma in the wrong place. There were also a couple that said where should the following sentence be added in the passage to clarify information.

Science: This was the hardest one for me because there were only 20 questions but 5-6 systems that were covered so there really wasn't a good way to study. I read through my A&P notes 2 times and really made sure to pay attention to the major points in each and that's all I did. Some of the questions that I can remember (these aren't exact but the main ideas):
* What are the three compartments in the body where water is held?
* Which of the following statements is the primary function of the circulatory system?
* Which body system is the main system used for the homeostasis of pH?
* Where does oxygen exchange take place?
* If a person has chronic hypertension, which of the following illustrates problems in their vascular system?

I did find that doing the quizzes at http://www.learningnurse.com/content/view/25/39/ was a helpful study tool and illustrated the types of questions that might be asked on the exam.