I'm still kind of in shock. Got my results this morning and I passed with a 542 — not a stellar score but I'll take it after failing by 11 points last October. I'm an oncology nurse with about four years of experience, mostly on a solid tumor unit, and I always assumed that would be enough to carry me through. It was not. The first time I barely cracked open a study guide and just relied on my clinical knowledge. Big mistake.
This time around I treated it like a real project. I gave myself 12 weeks, used the ONS Core Curriculum as my backbone, and supplemented with an OCN practice test every single weekend. Doing timed practice under test conditions was honestly the biggest shift for me — I realized I was running out of time on the actual exam because I wasn't used to pacing myself. If you're prepping right now, don't skip the practice tests, seriously.
Happy to share more specifics if anyone's studying. What topics are people finding hardest? For me it was the pharmacology section and late effects management — those killed me on attempt one.