To Study or Not to Study

I have been listening and talking to a lot of our classmates. What I have observed is this, the students that told me that they really did not study very much, were scoring some of the highest scores. Then there are the others that told me that they have done nothing but study night and day, harder than ever before, and they have been rewarded with the lowest scores ever, in their academic career. Hearing this, experiencing it first hand, and also having insult added to injury by being told that we just are not studying, can make you want to quit studying at all. Since chances are, that we will end up with a better score by throwing our books away, BUT I am definitely not advocating that! We need to learn this material for our nursing careers even if we are not going to be tested on what we are studying. We need to know this stuff to pass the NCLEX. After we learn what we have to, maybe we should just back our brains off and look at these questions as if we were not in the program. For example, when repeating some of the questions to our family members, they were able to pick out the right answer using common sense, when we with our heads full of entertaining lecture stories and notes, were misled into picking choices that sounded exactly like what had been drilled into our heads during every lecture! In other words, we need to pull back and see the big picture too.

Some suggestions are: Read last! Learn all the basic material by surveying the keypoints, looking at the charts, graphs and pictures. Take practice tests to find out what you already know. Read the ATI book and other outline books to get the basic concepts. Look through the medsurg book's study guide and see if you can answer the questions. Use the posted study guide to keep you ontrack and go over the power point and lecture notes again. Think nursing process, how do you assess, what do you see or expect to see, what are you going to do first, second etc, how do you evaluate the results. Compare and contrast similar disease processes. To tell them apart, look at the differences. Then look at everything with a common sense approach (do you get a different answer than with the academic approach? If so, why?). Remember the ABCs, safety and physio, and then psychosocial. You can't do anything until you assess something. Figure out the priority intervention, it will come before lab test results.
Use your mapping. Example: take a sheet of paper and divide it into 4 rectangles, put the word "Primary Hypertension" ( or whatever) in the middle where the lines cross. In the top left rectangle put all of the risk factors, in bottom left put the signs (objective- what you see, test results, etc). In the bottom right put the symptoms (subjective- what they feel, think, etc), and then in the top right, put in your interventions (including diet and proceedures). If you are really ambitious, write out your goals and evaluations on the back. Keep an eye out for obscure facts, diseases and exceptions to the normally expected findings and interventions (they have been coming up on the tests).
To improve your confidence and see how much you really know, practice NCLEX questions. Get with someone and talk about the choices outloud, you can learn a lot from hearing how someone else thinks and why. It will also show you where you need to study more. Lastly, NOW read through anything that still seems fuzzy. You should have less reading to do and it should make more sense.
Good luck everyone, only 2 weeks left! Stay out of the fridge, it will only make you feel worse! But on the other hand, we could look in there and figure out what we would give someone who is allergic to dairy products, on a cardiac diet, undergoing chemotherapy and suffering from diverticulitis.

Please post some suggestions here, especially any that have been working for you!