Rns2brwe...

Lisa,

Pardon me butting in, but I think I can answer your question. (RNs2brwe is probably out celebrating her recent 'pass' anyway. :) )

Each scored question that comes up on the NCLEX has been pretested with a large group of students. This pretesting is what determines the level of difficulty for a given question. (That's why some of your own NCLEX questions are unscored - you're pretesting future questions.) So no one (other than the testmakers) can really say that any one particular question is more difficult than another since we don't know how the students did on the item during pretesting.

What we can do is to make some educated guesses about difficulty levels in general. With delegation, for example, it requires us to know about two things: a) the ins and outs of a pt's condition and b) the roles, responsibilities, and knowledge of other healthcare providers. So instead of just asking us a strict knowledge question (like, 'What is the most common side effect of ACE inhibitors?'), they're asking us to put different pieces of the puzzle together. If we know about the condition but we don't know much about scope of practice, we'll likely miss it. Likewise, we can know all about RN/LPN/CNA scope of practice, but if we aren't familiar with the condition, we're still likely to get it wrong. The more stuff we have to know in order to get the question right, the higher the level of difficulty we can expect.

Good luck on your results! Try not to stress too much!

Lisa,

Pardon me butting in, but I think I can answer your question. (RNs2brwe is probably out celebrating her recent 'pass' anyway. :) )

Each scored question that comes up on the NCLEX has been pretested with a large group of students. This pretesting is what determines the level of difficulty for a given question. (That's why some of your own NCLEX questions are unscored - you're pretesting future questions.) So no one (other than the testmakers) can really say that any one particular question is more difficult than another since we don't know how the students did on the item during pretesting.

What we can do is to make some educated guesses about difficulty levels in general. With delegation, for example, it requires us to know about two things: a) the ins and outs of a pt's condition and b) the roles, responsibilities, and knowledge of other healthcare providers. So instead of just asking us a strict knowledge question (like, 'What is the most common side effect of ACE inhibitors?'), they're asking us to put different pieces of the puzzle together. If we know about the condition but we don't know much about scope of practice, we'll likely miss it. Likewise, we can know all about RN/LPN/CNA scope of practice, but if we aren't familiar with the condition, we're still likely to get it wrong. The more stuff we have to know in order to get the question right, the higher the level of difficulty we can expect.

Good luck on your results! Try not to stress too much!

What HE said, lol....