If you’re a Director or Dean of Nursing, the last 18 months have been a hell of a ride.
The 2024 pass rates told you everything was fine. Better than fine — some of you had your best year on record. Then the 2025 numbers came out and the floor moved a little. Then April 1, 2026 rolled around and the test plan changed again.
So here you are, looking at your spring cohort scores, taking a second look at your test bank, and trying to figure out if what you’re seeing is a blip, a trend, or something worth getting in front of now.
I’m going to share what I think it is. And then I’m going to walk through what I’d be looking at before the next cohort sits.
The 2025 drop is pointing to something deeper
Let me lay the numbers out plainly, because the noise around this has been a lot:
- First-time U.S.-educated NCLEX-RN pass rates dropped to 86.7% in 2025, down from 91.2% in 2024. That’s the largest single-year decline since the Next Generation NCLEX launched in April 2023.¹
- Overall pass rates (which include repeat and internationally educated candidates) fell to 69.1%, down from 73.3%.²
- Repeat test-takers? 52.7% pass rate for U.S.-educated repeaters in 2025. 30.3% for repeat internationally educated candidates.³
The official-ish framing is that 2025 was a “correction” after an unusually strong 2024. And sure — there’s truth in that. The 2024 cohort had the most prep time for the new NGN format. They self-selected for readiness. The bar looked higher than it actually was.
But the correction framing isn’t the whole story. The 2025 numbers are also pointing to something deeper — most programs are not yet teaching to the exam the NGN was designed to be.
The NGN measures clinical judgment. Not content recall. Not test-taking strategy. Clinical judgment — the cognitive work of recognizing cues, analyzing them, prioritizing hypotheses, generating solutions, taking action, and evaluating outcomes. That’s the NCSBN Clinical Judgment Measurement Model. It’s the spine of every new item type on the exam.⁴
And in a lot of the curricula I look at, content is still being taught the old way with NGN-style practice questions added on toward the end of the program. That approach worked when the exam was more forgiving. The 2024 rates suggested it still was. The 2025 rates are starting to suggest otherwise.
What actually changed on April 1, 2026
The new test plan didn’t blow up the exam. But it shifted things in ways that absolutely matter for how you map curriculum, tag items, and remediate at-risk students.⁵
Here’s what to know:
Renamed content categories and updated activity statements. Several Client Needs subcategories got revised activity statements. If your test bank tagging is still mapped to the 2023 plan — and many still are — your blueprints are quietly out of date.
More emphasis on infection prevention, telehealth, and mental health integration — folded directly into standard Med-Surg items rather than sitting in their own silos.⁶ The exam is mirroring how care actually happens now. If your course structure still treats mental health as a standalone semester that doesn’t really show up again until graduation, that’s worth a closer look.
Partial credit scoring keeps maturing. The polytomous scoring model means students can earn partial credit on bowtie, matrix, and case-study items. Translation: students who think clinically but don’t land on the perfect answer get rewarded more than they used to. But only if they were taught to think that way in the first place.
Remote NCLEX testing is in active pilot. NCSBN has been developing at-home administration for years and pilots are quietly running.⁷ It’s not the standard yet, but it’s worth thinking about how proctoring norms and student prep will shift over the next two cycles.
A story from a recent program audit
In a recent engagement, I was brought into a program that was watching its NCLEX pass rates slip and wanted help figuring out why. The Director was sharp, the faculty were committed, and on paper, everything looked like it should be working. They had a remediation plan, they had NGN-style practice questions, they had a structured at-risk student protocol.
When I sat down with the remediation plan, here’s what I found: students who were flagged as at-risk were being assigned more practice questions. That was the plan. More questions, more hours in the question bank, more attempts at the practice tests. There was no structured coaching on how to think through a case. No walking through the Clinical Judgment Measurement Model with a faculty member. No real instruction on how to recognize cues, analyze them, or prioritize hypotheses. Just volume.
And the students who weren’t passing? They were the students for whom volume was never going to be the answer. They didn’t need more reps. They needed someone to teach them how to think.
It wasn’t a bad-faith plan. It was a plan built for the old exam, still running in the new world.
What to audit before your next cohort tests
If your 2025 cohort dipped, or you’re watching your spring 2026 numbers come in and getting nervous, here’s what I’d put on a 30-day audit list. None of these require waiting on a consultant. You can start tomorrow.
1. Pull your test bank tagging against the April 2026 activity statements.
Most programs are still mapped to the 2023 plan. If you license items from a major vendor (ATI, Kaplan, HESI, UWorld), confirm they’ve pushed updated mappings — and that your faculty are actually using the new ones. If you use internally written items for your unit exams (and many of you do), your faculty need to re-tag them this term. Not next year. This term.
2. Look at where clinical judgment is actually being taught, not where it’s labeled.
The honest test is whether your students are working through the CJMM steps in their actual coursework — in case studies, in clinical post-conferences, in unit exam questions — or whether they’re just answering NGN-format practice items in their final semester after the content has already been delivered the old way. There’s a real difference, and the exam can tell.
3. Audit your remediation plan for at-risk students.
If at-risk students at your program are getting “more practice questions” as their remediation, that’s a plan built for the 2019 exam. The NGN asks for something different. At-risk students need structured coaching on how to think through a case — and if your faculty haven’t been trained on how to deliver that, the remediation plan will keep underperforming no matter how many hours of question bank time you add.
4. Look at your bridge between didactic and clinical.
The NGN rewards programs whose students can apply content in real time, not just recall it. The exam tests applied judgment — so the curriculum has to be teaching applied judgment. That means clinical post-conferences that walk through cases using the CJMM framework. Simulation scenarios that grade on judgment, not task completion. Didactic faculty and clinical faculty in actual conversation about what students are seeing on both sides. It’s not a small lift, but it’s where a lot of the real improvement happens.
5. Pull your sub-cohort data.
If your overall pass rate held steady but is now masking a significant gap between first-attempt domestic students and repeat or internationally educated students, you need to know that now. Because national trends say that gap is going to keep widening, and your program-level numbers will eventually reflect it.
The takeaway
Programs that take the 2025 signal and the April 2026 test plan changes seriously now are the ones most likely to come out of the next 18 months in good shape. I’m not saying that to scare anyone — I’m saying it because the patterns are pretty consistent. The dip is real, the test plan shifts are real, and waiting to see how it plays out is the most expensive option on the table.
The encouraging part is that none of this requires blowing up your curriculum. Most of the programs I work with don’t have a content problem — they have a mapping problem, a tagging problem, and a judgment-instruction problem. Those are all fixable. And the cost of fixing them is small compared to what a sustained pass rate dip costs you in accreditation risk, reputation, and enrollment.
It does take a willingness to look at the data and hear what it’s telling you, even when it’s uncomfortable. But most programs I talk to are ready for that conversation. They just need a starting point.
If you want help with any of that — pulling the audit, mapping the test bank, training faculty on clinical judgment instruction, or just having someone walk through your numbers with you — that’s the work I do. You can start a conversation here.
The earlier you look at this, the more options you have.
References
- Blueprint Prep, The NCLEX Pass Rate is Decreasing: What to Know for 2026 (February 2026). https://blog.blueprintprep.com/nursing/what-is-the-nclex-pass-rate/
- Nurse.com, NCLEX Pass Rates: What the 2025 Decline Means for Nursing Students (February 2026). https://www.nurse.com/blog/nclex-pass-rates-understanding-2025-decline/
- Kaplan Test Prep, NCLEX Pass Rates 2026: What You Need to Know (2026). https://www.kaptest.com/study/nclex/nclex-pass-rates-what-you-need-to-know/
- National Council of State Boards of Nursing, NCLEX Pass Rates Dashboard. https://www.ncsbn.org/exams/exam-statistics-and-publications/nclex-pass-rates.page
- Your Nursing Space, Must Know NCLEX 2026 Trends (January 2026). https://yournursingspace.com/blogs/news/must-know-nclex-2026-trends
- Kaplan Test Prep, NCLEX Pass Rates 2026 (cited above).
- Nurse.org, Overall NCLEX Pass Rates Fall in 2025 (February 2026). https://nurse.org/news/nclex-pass-rates-decline-remote-testing-update/