The NCLEX-PN (National Council Licensure Examination for Practical Nurses) test determines if it is practically safe for a person to begin nursing practice as an entry-level vocational nurse. The State Boards have a mandate for the protection of the general public from unsafe, ineffective, and poor nursing care.

There are four major categories divided further into eight sub-categories included in the examination. The exam content is integrated, i.e., there are no categories for each separate sector of medicine. The questions in the test are usually multiple choice with four possible variants. Still, there may be questions in various other formats like multi-response, fill-in-the-blank, hot spots, and charts. Every candidate has to answer a minimum of eighty-five questions and a maximum of two hundred and five questions. Irrespective of the number of questions one may answer, he/she will have to answer twenty-five experimental questions that neither count for or against your score. They only provide an incentive for the examiners to design future questions in the exam. The students are not restricted to a specific time-limit for every question; they’ll have a maximum of five hours to complete the entire comprehensive exam, including a tutorial in the beginning. The candidate may or may not avail a break after two hours of testing, or an additional break further ninety minutes of the exam process.

There is no numerical value or a threshold/cutoff score to determine whether you have passed or failed the NCLEX-PN exam. At the end of the examination, the administrators will determine whether or not you have passed the test. The results will not be available by the State Boards of Nursing on their official site; instead, you will be notified of your result by the Board approximately two to six weeks after the exam date.

If you have failed the NCLEX-PN exam, it means that you did not successfully answer questions at the same or above the difficulty level that you require to pass the test. As a result, you will be declared as a rejected candidate for vocational nursing practice. In case of failure, you will receive a thorough diagnostic report on the evaluation of your exam. This report will provide you the feedback on your test performance. It will contain information about how many questions you have answered on the exam; hence, determining how close you came to passing the test. If you have failed on your first try, you can use the diagnostic report to determine and focus on your problem areas and prepare accordingly for the next attempt. You can apply for a retest forty-five days after you initially applied for the first test.