Standardized Exams

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Many of you have some experience with standardized exams. You may have been required to take the SAT or ACT to get into nursing school. Remember taking that exam? Was your experience positive or negative?

All standardized exams share the same characteristics:

• Tests are written by content specialists and test-construction experts.
• The content of the exam is researched and planned.
• The questions are designed according to test construction methodology (all answer choices are about the same length, the verb tenses all agree, etc.).
• All the questions are tested before use on the actual exam.

The NCLEX-PN^® exam is similar to other standardized exams in some ways yet different in others:

• The NCLEX-PN^® exam is written by nurse specialists who are experts in a content area of nursing.
• All content is selected to allow the beginning practical/vocational nurse to prove minimum competency on all areas of the test plan.
• Minimum-competency questions are most frequently asked at the application level, not the recognition or recall level. All the responses to a question are similar in length and subject matter, and are grammatically correct.
• All test items have been extensively tested by NCSBN. The questions are valid; all correct responses are documented in two different sources.

What does this mean for you?

• NCSBN has defined what is minimum-competency, entry-level nursing.
• Questions and answers will be written in such a way that you cannot, in most cases, predict or recognize the correct answer.
• NCSBN is knowledgeable about strategies regarding length of answers, grammar, and so on. It makes sure that you can’t use these strategies in order to select correct answers. English majors have no advantage!
• The answer choices have been extensively tested. The people who write the test questions make the incorrect answer choices look attractive to the unwary test taker.