Virginia Western Community College’s Nursing Program has unlocked an achievement: 100 percent of graduates sitting for the NCLEX-RN exam in 2023 passed on the first attempt.
The National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN), a not-for-profit organization, has developed and recently updated the NCLEX to assess nursing school graduates in the U.S. and Canada. Graduates must pass the National Council Licensure Examination to become registered nurses.
Forty Virginia Western graduates, all of whom received an Associate of Applied Science in Nursing in May 2023, sat for the NCLEX-RN exam last year between April 1 and Dec. 31. All passed on the first attempt, which is the first time in at least 10 years this has occurred.
The national average of graduates from associate degree programs passing the NCLEX-RN on first attempt was 87.75% in 2023.
“The point of the NCLEX is patient safety,” said Lauren Hayward, Virginia Western’s administrative officer for nursing. “It’s to prevent people from entering practice who can’t demonstrate clinical thinking or clinical judgment.”
The 2023 cohort was the first to take the Next Generation NCLEX (NGN). Through research and review dating back to 2009, the NCSBN identified a critical need for clinical judgment in entry-level nursing. The NCSBN found that newly licensed nurses have been required to make progressively more complex decisions about patients, an increasing amount of whom are acutely ill.
The NGN format “has a different scoring plan,” Hayward said. “It still has the same NCLEX-style questions. But it also has a huge focus on case study testing scenarios.” The NGN test aims to measure clinical judgment, and questions are geared toward application of knowledge rather than simply memorization.
“NCSBN truly did a top-notch job getting us trained for those changes. They resourced us for almost a decade, and they continue to update resources annually,” Hayward said.
Interim Nursing Program Head Kathy Smith, an associate professor at Virginia Western, noted that long before the 2023 graduates sat for the NCLEX, they were accustomed to the new format. “We started experimenting with making changes to the structure and format of our tests, what it looked like, to make it look more like NGN style,” Smith said. “So when the students went to NCLEX, it was like, ‘Okay, I know this. I’ve seen this format before.'”
In 2022, Virginia Western’s pass rate was 96.83% on the first attempt. Previous to that, however, pass rates slumped during the intense challenges of COVID, slipping below the bar of 80% passing on their first attempt in 2020 and 2021. Success in 2022 came after tireless efforts of faculty to perform curriculum review, scrutinize what concepts students struggled with in testing, and implement a coaching program to prepare each cohort for the NCLEX.
Even with the 100% success, Virginia Western’s nursing faculty are constantly looking for more ways to support student learning. “We analyze every test after we give it for how our students scored on it, and that gives that gives us feedback every year,” Smith said. Two nursing faculty members review every test. “So every faculty here is embedded in in the curriculum and the testing and the analysis of the testing.”
Hayward noted that clinical practice is constantly in change, and that the level of a nurse’s responsibility has increased every year.
“We have so much respect for the students, people who are stepping up in this economy and in this profession at this time, and saying, ‘I want to do this.’ We’re behind them,” said Hayward. “We do all that we can from our side to help them focus on what’s important. It’s really inspiring. It’s tremendous what the faculty do to help the students succeed.”
