Studying for the RD exam!

So I’ve been finished with my internship and have had a whirlwind couple of months! I have signed up to take my test, so I will write once I have done that! I have been studying so much! I wanted to write a post about my studying since I have seen so many others do that and I think it’s a good way to share information! (Of course I won’t know how well it worked until after I take the test!)

My current life.

 

^Inman important “Notes”

I have primarily been using Jean Inman (2013 version- because that is the version I got from a friend). I have the cds on in my car constantly. Her voice can get hard to listen to because it’s a very calm voice so it’s not attention grabbing and upbeat. Here’s kind of how I went about studying:

1. One of the first things I did was listen to all of the cds while going through the notes. She says “note” when something is really important and should be highlighted
2. After doing this for all of the domains, I went through and typed up all of the highlighted parts. This ended up being 33 pages! WOW! For a while I just went through and read the highlighted version (while I was still finishing up my internship).
3. Then I started studying everything. I went through all the domains, not super in depth studying, but decent. I then took all the practice test questions (I think it was about 1030 questions). I scored them.
4. After getting the scores, I saw where to focus my time. I then started going through all the domains, in depth. I focused on domains 3 and 4 (Management and Food and Nutrition Systems) because these sections are hard for me to study because I don’t enjoy them, so I had to buckle down to really get them. After hardcore studying that for a few days, I retook the test for that (scored 89% this time!). And the ones I missed for the second time, I wrote down all those questions with the correct answer.
5. Next is on to domain 2. I am still currently working on that. I will do the same thing. Read through, study well, then retake the test and write down things I got wrong again. I am currently going through all the diseases and just writing down the MNT recommendations and nothing else to focus on those.
6. After domain 2, I will work on domain 1.
7. Between all of these I have been taking the practice tests online from The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. I was lucky because my internship paid for that so I didn’t have to. What is nice about those tests is that at the end, there is an explanation of the correct answers. The downfall is there is limited test questions so you start to learn the answer without reading the question.
   
8. I also have a Breeding RD Prep 2013 (from another friend). She gave me the notecards as well so I have gone through those. After finishing Inman, I will read more in depth through Breeding because it’s set up differently so you get it from a different perspective.
9. I now have a calendar set up for what I need to get through now until the exam. I wish I would have kept one up until now, but I didn’t!

It seems like a lot, but I am one of those people that HAS to go through everything 500 times to get it right. I’m not one to read it once then pass. So I will keep updated how prepared I felt going into the test.