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- Get an early start on the day you take the examination, to avoid raising your anxiety level before the actual examination starts. Allow yourself time for delays in traffic and in public transportation or for finding a parking place. Even allow for a dead battery, flooded engine, flat tire, or bus breakdown. If you are unfamiliar with the area in which the test center is located, find it the day before.
- Remember that you do not need to get all the answers right to pass. The examination is designed to test for minimum competence; demonstrating a higher level will not earn a special designation on your license, or any other bonus. Moreover, due to the adaptive nature of the test, you will probably reach a level where you are answering only 50% of the questions correctly; this is normal for this test and should not in itself be taken as an indication of poor performance (you may be answering 50% of the very difficult questions correctly)!
- Because you cannot skip questions and go back to them, or go back to change answers, it is important that you simply do the best you can on a particular question, using the TEST-TAKING-TIPs and Guidelines: Sixty Strategies to Use in Answering Questions, Chapter 2. Guidelines and Tips for International Nurses and Repeat Test-Takers, Test-Taking-Tips and Guidelines: Sixty Strategies to Use in Answering Question, and move on. The adaptive test will give you another chance to show your competence, should you get that question wrong.
- Remember that, although you cannot change answers you have already "confirmed," you may change your answer during the selection process. As you make your answer selection, you will choose an answer (by pressing the enter key once) and then confirm it (by pressing the <NEXT> key); you will be able to change your mind before confirming your answer choice.
- Although the examination uses different levels of difficulty to estimate your competence level, do not try to figure out the difficulty level of each question; likewise, do not try to keep track of the number of questions you are answering. You will only distract yourself and raise your anxiety. Again, simply answer each question to the best of your ability and move on.
- When taking practice questions, it is a good idea to aim for an average of 1 minute per question, so that you will be at a speed to finish the examination even if you do need to take the maximum number of questions. For the actual examination, however, the 6-hour time limit is not a problem for most candidates, so go ahead and take the time to work through a difficult problem, and make use of the scratch paper provided (but don't dwell on a question you "just can't get!").