I just did uworld at leisure. Like spent 1 hour a day MAX doing questions and READING THE RATIONALES. The week before the exam I spent around 2 hours a day refreshing on things like lab values, drug classes and how to identify them, and general memorization stuff. Read the KAPLAN test plan. It really explains that the NCLEX is all about critical thinking skills and having the ability to make appropriate clinical judgements... not how much you know or your ability to memorize. I found that even for the questions I DIDNT know, I was still able to answer correctly because I was able to discern what my next step should be by thinking critically. For example, client comes into GP clinic with prescription for timolol eyedrops and insert antipsychotic that ive never heard of here_. She states that she has had a positive at home pregnancy test. Place the following in order of priority:
Exploring the client's feelings about the possible pregnancy with her.
Providing patient education.
Completing a urinalysis for the patient.
Examine the patient's Hx for reasons why she might be using antipsychotic drug ive never heard of.
The answer is 2, 3, 1, 4. We dont know what the med is by heart, but we do recognize it is from a class of antipsychotics. We know that many antipsychotics can result in false positive pregnancy tests for women. Therefore we provide client education about the drug and false positives (and possibly re: other complications like TD, a major one) and why we will do another urinalysis to double check. Then we explore the womans feelings regarding pregnancy, because if she is planning to become pregnant we have to make sure that her hx will allow for use of another drug that is not contraindicated for pregnancy.
Anyway thats pretty long winded and kaplan has way better examples, but I passed at 78 questions and I barely "memorized" or "studied". I just practiced questions and read rationales so I knew how to think rather than what to know.