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Is it worth it to take the NCSBN NCLEX Practice Exam (NPE)?

Well, that's a great question.

It's truly an interesting idea. The NCSBN realizes how traumatizing and anxiety-producing their exam is so they decided to capitalize it and make some money out of it! I've been ignoring it, but their latest In Focus Winter 2019 News bulletin showed up in my email and I decided to take a closer look.

Here's the gist of it. To the tune of $150, you can earn the privilege of taking 2 NCLEX-style exams of 125 questions each. You may not pause these tests once they have began. It sounds as if they might reluctantly reset an exam in case of technical failure, but only after begging. And there is the standard limit of 5 hours for NCLEX-PN and 6 hours for NCLEX-RN, respectively.

The NCSBN claims to have been developing these exams over the course of four years in order to create a test-like scenario. I'm not sure why it took them that long because their concept is kind of a rip-off. Why? Ha. Let's take a look.

1. You can't review the test. 

That's right. You paid $150 to take two exams where you can't review the results. NCSBN says that the whole point of this exam is to simulate test-like conditions and that is all. Therefore, it claims, the answers don't matter. I'm calling BS here.


2. It doesn't predict whether or not you will pass your NCLEX. 

In fact, the NCSBN specifically swears that little factoid up and down so that you can't claim it as a misconception later! This is direct from the NCSBN FAQ about the NCLEX Practice Exam:

"Your score on the NCLEX Practice Exam is not a predictor of whether you will pass or fail the NCLEX. The NCLEX Practice Exam provides a look and feel of the actual NCLEX."
Sheesh. The whole FAQ is like that. Here's an answer to what is probably a common question: "I feel like the practice exam did not help me prepare for NCLEX, can I get a refund?"

The NCLEX Practice Exam is non-refundable. The practice exam provides the look and feel of the actual NCLEX but is not intended as a nursing content study tool.



THEN WHAT'S THE POINT?!

3. When you have completed the test, you will receive a report with the percentage of correct answers and nothing else.  

It doesn't show you the questions you got right or the ones you got wrong. It doesn't let you go back and review it. It doesn't even show you "passing" or "near passing" or "below passing" for different categories. You are paying $150 for useless information when you might as well pay $200 and get a better report as well as standing a chance of actually passing the damn NCLEX just by attempting it.

4. Since nobody knows exactly what percentage of NCLEX questions you must answer correctly in order to pass, the single result you receive is useless.


Take a look around the Internet. No one knows exactly what percentage of NCLEX-style questions you must get right in order to pass the real thing. Yeah, everyone knows you have to stay above the passing line, at least until 75 questions or further if it takes that, but no one knows if that means getting 25% correct or 75%.

Most tutors and tutoring companies suspect it's somewhere between 50 to 70% correct, including myself, but that's only guessing. The NCSBN states its test is at zero logits, which translates to getting right approximately 50% of the medium-difficulty questions. We only know that if you use review courses that actually are meant to review content that consistently scoring between 55% to 75% is a general indicator of success.

So maybe you've already bought the NCLEX Practice Exam and you scored a 50%. But what difficulty of questions did they give you? I have no idea if that's great or not. NCSBN does, but they're not going to tell you for love or money... even $150 worth of money apparently.

Conclusion

Don't bother buying this. This is purely a money-grab. It won't give you any useful information. Take that $150 and buy a subscription to Uworld for a month ($119 currently) and maybe the ebook of NCLEX Simplified ($20). It'll be a much more worthwhile investment that actually assists you with content and question strategy instead of purporting to create an "accurate testing environment" and nothing else.
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