The National Council Licensure Examination determines if it's safe to take the leap from education to practice by evaluating your intellectual progress via an application-analysis platform based on knowledge you acquired in nursing school. Simply put, critical thinking skills.
The NCLEX-RN is organized to assess individual client needs by integrating each medical, surgical, paediatric, psychiatric, and obstetric knowledge. Questions range from, a majority of, multiple-response to fill-in-the-blank, hot spots, chart/exhibit and drag-and-drop. A minimum of 75 questions to a maximum of 265 questions will be assessed preluded by 15 non-consequential experimental questions used for examiner purposes in order to calculate future questions. For the text to be completed, the minimum (75) or maximum (265) amount of questions must be answered within a period of six hours.
NCLEX is divided into four major concepts and six subconcepts:
- Safe and Effective Care Environment
- Management of Care (17-23%)
- Safety and Infection Control (9-15%)
- Health Promotion and Maintenance
- Psychosocial Integrity
- Physiological Integrity
- Basic Care and Comfort (6-12%)
- Pharmacological and Parenteral Therapies (12-18%)
- Reduction of Risk Potential (9-15%)
- Physiological Adaptation (11-17%)
The NCLEX consists of an integrated computer adaptive test (CAT) questing system. CATs begin with simple questions, but gradually becomes more difficult. As you progress through the CAT, the difficulty of your questions will oscillate based on the competency of your answer i.e. if you get a question wrong the following question will be easier rather than more difficult and vice versa.
Brass taxes: NCLEX is pass/fail—there is no other score. Results, however, will not be available at the time of exam: you'll be notified within 2-4 weeks following your test date with retesting permitted 45 days after the initial administration.
