Acing the NCLEX-RN

October 21st, 2009

Before you can officially begin your nursing career, you must take the NCLEX-RN, otherwise known at the National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurse. Nursing students only have three chances to pass the NCLEX-RN, but typically passing rates are positive. According to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, 88.42 percent of the students educated in the United States who took the NCLEX-RN passed it the first time they took it in 2009. To ace the NCLEX-RN, you are going to want to know about its format, content, and questions.

To ensure the safety of the public, those who want to practice nursing are required to pass the NCLEX-RN. Both created and administered by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the exam assesses the skills, abilities, and knowledge that are necessary to safely and effectively practice nursing at the entry-level. The NCLEX-RN appears in a CAT format, known as computerized adaptive testing. This method of testing takes into consideration the way that the test taker has answered previous questions in order to select future questions, making it so that an examinee who answers a difficult question correctly is then presented with a more difficult question. But, one who answers a difficult question incorrectly is then presented with a simpler question.

The NCLEX-RN contains content over the categories of patient needs including safe and effective care environment, health promotion and maintenance, psychosocial integrity, and physiological integrity. Within the safe and effective care environment category, topics appear that concern infection control and management of care. The health promotion and maintenance category contains content about growth and development through the life span and prevention and early detection of disease. The category of psychosocial integrity involves the issues of coping and adaption, and psychosocial adaption. The exam concludes with the physiological integrity category, which addresses basic care and comfort, reduction of risk potential, physiological adaption, and pharmacological and parenteral therapies.

The majority of questions on the exam appear in a multiple choice answer format, but some may ask broader questions which cannot be answered through multiple choice. These types of questions might require examinees to look a picture of a body part and identify a particular area of it that is relevant to the question. Others may require that you make a mathematical calculation and input an answer about a question related to medication dosage. And there may be some questions that pertain to medical or nursing procedures and will ask you to arrange actions in the correct order. To accurately answer questions to their best ability, examinees must apply their knowledge and use cognitive abilities, such as memorization, recalling, analysis, and application.

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