How to Improve Your Nursing Program's NCLEX Rate

Benchmark against the right number: The first-time, U.S.-educated pass rate (86.7% for the NCLEX-RN in 2025), is the figure most state boards tie to approval.
Diagnose before fixing: Break results down by cohort, admission pathway, content area, and time to test.
Align with the Next Gen NCLEX: Map courses to the clinical judgment model and rebuild exams around NGN item types.
Assess continuously: Benchmark each semester and pair every checkpoint with remediation.
Protect faculty and placements: Turnover and inconsistent clinical sites can undo classroom gains.

Did you know?

The national first-time U.S.-educated NCLEX-RN pass rate dropped from 91.2% in 2024 to 86.7% in 2025.

If you thought that a bad pass rate from students in a nursing program was only a reputation number, it’s not.

Most state boards require programs to meet or exceed a set benchmark to retain approval. A failing pass rate can put accreditation standing at risk. So, if you want to know how to improve your nursing program’s National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) pass rate, get ready. You’ll need to run a diagnostic across admissions, curriculum, faculty, and clinical placement and then turn those findings into action.

Think about this process as a framework rather than a tactic. In this guide, we’ll cover:

What a strong pass rate looks like today
How to diagnose where your gap actually is
Evidence-based levers that move the number

What counts as a strong NCLEX pass rate today?

A strong first-time pass rate today sits at or above the national average.

In 2025, that average was roughly the same for first-time, U.S.-educated candidates: 86.7% for the NCLEX-RN and 86.6% for the NCLEX-PN. The total pass rate across all candidates, which includes repeat testers and internationally educated candidates, was lower: 69.1% for the RN exam and 77.3% for the PN exam.

When you set your nursing program NCLEX benchmark, be sure to use the first-time U.S.-educated rate, since that's the number state boards of nursing typically link to your approval status.

Most state boards set a minimum threshold tied to that national figure and trigger a formal review when a program falls below it. How they define that threshold varies. North Carolina, for example, requires programs to maintain a pass rate at or above 90% of the national rate.

How the state sets the bar	What it means
A fixed pass rate	Your program has to hit a set number, often around 80%
A share of the national rate	Your program has to stay above a percentage of the national average, so the bar moves each year
A multi-year average	The state looks at your last 2 or 3 years together, so one bad year doesn't sink you
A trigger for review	Falling below the line starts a review or self-study, not an automatic penalty

`Why are NCLEX pass rates declining nationally?`

The answer is not a sudden drop in student quality; it’s largely attributed to a change in the exam structure. In April 2023, the Next Gen NCLEX (NGN) was launched, which shifted the exam’s emphasis from recall to clinical judgment and applied reasoning.

That shift exposed a gap. Many programs had built their curricula and test banks around the previous exam, so students were preparing for a test that no longer exists in the same form. As curricula, faculty, and study resources catch up to the NGN, pass rates will likely recover. Programs that wait for that to happen on its own, however, may fall below their board's threshold first.

Start with a real diagnostic, not a guess

How can you know which part of the process is failing?

Before reaching for fixes, find out where the gap actually is. The most common mistake is treating the pass rate as one undifferentiated number and reacting to it as a whole, when the real story is almost always in the breakdown.

Effective NCLEX pass rate improvement strategies start with pulling the pass rate apart by the dimensions that reveal patterns:

Cohort: Break results down by graduating cohort to see whether the decline is recent or long-running and whether one group is more affected than others.
Admission pathway: Segment by entry route, such as traditional, accelerated, licensed practical nurse-to-registered nurse, or transfer, to determine whether certain pathways correlate with lower performance.
Content area: Use the NCLEX Program Reports available through the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) to compare your candidates' performance by content area and client-need category against the national average, rather than treating readiness as a single score.
Time to test: Track how long each graduate waits between graduation and test date. Candidates who delay testing for months tend to pass at lower rates, and that points to a different fix than a curriculum problem does.

The results of your diagnostic will tell you which of the following strategies to prioritize.

Review admission and progression policies

Your pass rate is partly an input variable, shaped by who you admit and how you support them along the way. That makes program admission and progression policies an upstream lever that nursing programs sometimes underuse.

Admission criteria set the baseline readiness for each cohort. Progression policies determine whether struggling students get caught and supported or simply advance toward an exam they are not ready for. In practice, that means reviewing policies such as:

Entrance requirements: A standardized pre-admission exam, such as the TEAS or HESI A2, with minimum scores tied to your own outcome data
Science GPA: Weighting prerequisite science courses more heavily than overall GPA, since they tend to predict performance in nursing coursework
Early alerts: A midterm trigger that flags students below a set grade and requires a meeting with faculty or advising
Remediation before retakes: A documented remediation plan before a student can repeat a failed nursing course
Retake limits: Clear limits on how many nursing courses can be repeated, and how many times

This might sound as if you are making the gatekeeping process harder, but it’s not. This is about making sure the students you admit are set up to succeed and that your safeguards actually fire before graduation.

Align curriculum with the Next Gen NCLEX

A curriculum that only introduces clinical judgment thinking in the final semester leaves students underprepared.

Next Generation NCLEX curriculum alignment is a structural shift, and it starts with an audit. Specifically:

Map every course to the clinical judgment model: NCSBN's Clinical Judgment Measurement Model has 6 steps—recognize cues, analyze cues, prioritize hypotheses, generate solutions, take actions, and evaluate outcomes. Review each course to find where each step is taught and where it is assessed, then close the gaps.
Rebuild course exams around NGN item types: Add unfolding case studies, matrix and grid items, bowtie, highlight, and extended multiple response questions, and score them with the same partial-credit approach the exam uses. Set a target share of NGN-style items per exam and raise it each term.
Crosswalk content to the current NCLEX test plan: NCSBN updates the test plan every 3 years. Check that your course content and exam weighting match the client-need categories and percentages in the plan currently in effect.
Start case-based learning in the first year: Weave case studies into foundational courses rather than saving them for medical-surgical or capstone courses, so students practice reasoning before the content gets harder.
Use simulation with structured debriefing: Tie debriefs to the clinical judgment model so students name the cues they recognized, the hypotheses they prioritized, and what they would do differently.

A case study published in Nurse Educator documented how one program's pass rate rose from 68% to 92% in a single year after a curriculum revision built around a clinical judgment framework. Structural work of this kind can move the number significantly when it runs through the whole program rather than one review course.

Build in continuous assessment and remediation

The shift from a single high-stakes exit exam to ongoing formative assessment is a reliable way to protect your pass rate. When gaps only surface at a terminal exam, there is no time left to remediate them.

Standardized predictive exams, used well and independent of any single vendor, can flag at-risk students and content gaps early rather than in the final weeks before graduation. Pair checkpoints with a structured remediation pathway.

A workable cadence looks like this:

Benchmark each semester: Give a standardized assessment at the end of every semester, not just at the end of the program.
Remediate below the cutoff: Any student scoring below your benchmark gets an individualized remediation plan with specific content areas, a timeline, and a reassessment date.
Embed exam prep in the final semester: Build a prep course into the final term with a practice-question volume target and a focus on NGN item types, rather than offering it as an optional add-on.
Shorten time to test: Coach students to apply for their authorization to test (ATT) as soon as they are eligible and to schedule the exam within weeks of graduation, instead of waiting.

Invest in nursing faculty development

Faculty development is a well-documented but underused lever.

Help nursing instructors prepare students for the NGN exam. That can include:

Calibration sessions: Faculty score the same clinical judgment items together so an item is graded the same way in every section.
Shared rubrics: Common rubrics for applied-reasoning questions instead of individual judgment calls.
NGN familiarity: Faculty work through NGN case studies themselves before assigning them to students.
Item-writing workshops: Training on writing NGN-style questions, since most faculty learned to write traditional multiple-choice items.
Exam blueprinting and peer review: Every course exam is mapped to the test plan and reviewed by a second faculty member before it is given.

The aim is program and faculty consistency. A student's readiness should not depend on which instructor's section they happened to land in.

Faculty retention

Development only pays off if the faculty you train stay. Faculty support and retention need to be part of your pass rate strategy, not a separate HR concern.

Everything in the list above—calibrated scoring, shared rubrics, NGN-aligned item banks—is institutional knowledge, and much of it lives with individual instructors. When they leave, it leaves with them.

The national nursing faculty shortage makes this worse. Programs that cannot fill full-time positions lean on adjunct and part-time instructors, who teach fewer sections and often have other professional demands.

So treat faculty turnover as a pass rate metric. Track it alongside your cohort data, and note which sections were taught by which instructors when you break results down.

Don’t overlook clinical placement quality

How much will clinicals affect the outcome for your nursing students?

The connection between clinical placement quality and nursing program outcomes is direct.

Students benefit greatly from the clinical experience they can gain when there is consistency and depth within the placement. They need opportunities to apply classroom theory to real-world clinical judgment. A student who rotated through varied, well-precepted assignments has practiced the kind of situational reasoning the NGN tests for.

Find the best placements for your students

In practice, placement quality comes down to a few specifics.

Students can benefit when:

Rotations expose them to a variety of settings and patient acuities
Preceptors receive an orientation to your program's expectations and evaluation tools, so quality does not vary widely from site to site
Post-clinical debriefs follow the clinical judgment model, so the day's experience becomes reasoning practice rather than hours logged

For programs struggling to secure enough consistent, quality placements, Nursa for Schools helps connect nursing programs with clinical placement capacity.

Your program needs a continuous improvement cycle

Programs that sustain strong pass rates treat improvement as a continuous process. A one-time corrective push after a bad year tends to fade, leaving the next dip to arrive without warning.

A continuous improvement plan for your NCLEX pass rate ties the previous sections into an ongoing cycle:

Review disaggregated outcome data for each cohort to see what is actually happening.
Diagnose gaps at the cohort and content level rather than reacting to the top-line number.
Adjust the curriculum, faculty support, and progression policy based on the data.
Re-measure the next cohort to confirm whether the change worked.

Give the cycle an owner and a calendar and keep a running summary of findings and changes.

Many state boards require a formal nursing program self-study report when pass rates fall below the benchmark. So, if you are already running this cycle, much of that report is written before a board asks for it.

Of all the levers in this cycle, clinical placement is the one you cannot fully control from inside your program. It depends on facility partners, preceptor availability, and capacity you may not have. Nursa for Schools connects nursing programs with clinical placement capacity so your students get the consistent, varied experience that clinical judgment readiness depends on. Learn more about Nursa for Schools.

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