Stop Studying Everything Twice: How to Prep for NCLEX While You're Still in Nursing School
You shouldn't have to re-learn pharmacology for boards when you just passed the midterm. Here's how to study once, not twice.
Stop Studying Everything Twice: How to Prep for NCLEX® While You're Still in Nursing School
You grind through pharmacology for your midterm. You pass. Six months later you're sitting down with the same drug classes for NCLEX® prep like you've never seen them.
That's a lot of wasted weeks.
We built Coursework Mode inside Lily so you only have to learn it once. It works for every class exam between now and graduation, and it builds toward boards at the same time.
The idea: study once, not twice.
The Problem Every Nursing Student Knows
Nursing school and NCLEX® prep get treated as two separate projects. You study your professor's lectures for class exams. After graduation you buy a $300 question bank and start over for boards.
Same material, learned twice. Once to pass your classes, once to pass NCLEX®.
Students who do well on boards tend to be the ones who built a solid foundation during school, not the ones who crammed hardest in the last month. Most tools don't help you do that. This one is meant to.
What Coursework Mode Does
Coursework Mode makes Lily a study partner for your actual classes. Upload your syllabi, lecture notes, and slides, and Lily builds practice questions from your professor's content.
They aren't pulled from a premade bank. They come from what your professor is teaching, tied to your learning objectives and your exam schedule.
Here's how it works:
Upload your materials. Drop in PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, or TXT files up to 50 MB each. Lily reads the content, maps concepts to body systems, and pulls out key medications and learning objectives.
Organize by class and unit. Create classes with your professor's name, semester, and individual units. Set it up in a few minutes, or let Lily pull a unit breakdown from your syllabus.
Practice questions from your own content. Every question comes from what you uploaded, in NCLEX®-style formats, and difficulty adapts as you improve. You stop guessing what to study and practice what your exam covers.
Track your readiness per unit. See your accuracy, mastery level (recall, comprehension, application, analysis), and which learning objectives you've been tested on. After each real exam, you can log your grade and reflect on what worked.
Exam countdown and cram planning. A timeline shows your upcoming exams by date. When one is within 7 days, Lily turns on a Cram Plan that highlights your weakest topics.
Weekly goals and streaks. Set a question target for each class, anywhere from 5 to 500 per week, and track your progress. A coursework streak helps you show up daily.
How This Is Different from NCLEX® Mode
Lily already has an NCLEX® prep mode aligned to the 2026 test plan. Coursework Mode doesn't replace it. It covers the other half.
NCLEX® Mode pulls from a curated, boards-aligned question pool covering all nursing topics. Practice is adaptive, with spaced review and adjustable difficulty. The free plan includes Single Best Answer, Select All That Apply, Matrix, and Drop-Down Cloze questions. BowTie and Unfolding Case Studies come with Full Access. It's where you train for boards.
Coursework Mode builds questions from your uploaded materials, scoped to only what your professor covers. Tracking is isolated per class and per unit, and study urgency is driven by your actual exam dates. It's where you train for class exams.
The two modes feed each other. The clinical knowledge you build for your Med-Surg midterm is the same knowledge NCLEX® asks for. Coursework Mode builds it while you're learning it, so you aren't rebuilding it later.
Who This Is For
First and second semester students. Everything feels like a lot right now. Coursework Mode gives you a place to start: practice from your own lectures instead of staring at a 400-page textbook.
Third and fourth semester students. You've found a rhythm, but the exams are harder and the material keeps stacking up. Use Coursework Mode to stay sharp on each unit, then switch to NCLEX® Mode to practice across topics.
Final semester and post-graduation. You're probably in NCLEX® Mode most of the time. If you're still finishing coursework too, you can handle both in one app.
If you're in nursing school, you're taking NCLEX® eventually. Starting with Coursework Mode means way less to re-learn later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this replace my textbook or lecture notes?
No. Coursework Mode builds practice questions from your materials. You still need to learn the content first. It's active recall practice on your own source material.
What file formats can I upload?
PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and TXT, plus images in some cases. Each file can be up to 50 MB once you have a free account.
Are the questions any good?
Each question links back to a supporting excerpt from your upload, and it goes through the same automated quality checks as our NCLEX® questions: format rules, answer structure, rationale coverage, classification, duplicate screening, and clinical safety rules. Those checks can't guarantee a question is perfect, so verify anything clinical against your course materials. See how we build and check our questions.
Can I use this AND NCLEX® Mode?
Yes. They're built to work together. Use Coursework Mode for your class exams and NCLEX® Mode for boards-specific practice. Your progress in both contributes to your overall nursing knowledge base.
How much does it cost?
Coursework Mode is included on every plan, even the free one. The free plan includes 1 class and up to 15 Coursework questions a month within a 50-question monthly allowance (rolling 30 days). It costs nothing and needs no credit card. Full Access unlocks unlimited standard and Coursework practice for $15/month, with a $50 four-month option and a $120 Lifetime option too.
Start Building Your Foundation Now
NCLEX® prep doesn't have to wait for graduation. You can start now with the material you're already studying.
Upload your syllabus and practice from your own lectures.
Try Coursework Mode free. No credit card required.
About the Author: Harrison is the founder of Study With Lily, an NCLEX® prep platform built for the 2026 test plan. After watching his wife and her classmates struggle with the gap between coursework and boards prep, he built Lily to close it.