About the NCLEX questions

[jdeez42]

how often do they change the questions? I've heard every year and every 3 months, any kind of help would be great

[suebird3]

Welcome to allnurses.com! I moved your post to the NCLEX Forum for more responses.

Suebird

[EricJRN, MSN, RN]

There is not a uniform set of questions given to each and every tester. Your questions may be much different than those given to someone else. There is also a mechanism which ensures that candidates don't receive exactly the same item from one NCLEX attempt to another. For more information on the way the NCLEX works, you might check out the 2006 Candidate Bulletin at www.ncsbn.org .

[nursemomruns]

There is not a uniform set of questions given to each and every tester. Your questions may be much different than those given to someone else. There is also a mechanism which ensures that candidates don't receive exactly the same item from one NCLEX attempt to another. For more information on the way the NCLEX works, you might check out the 2006 Candidate Bulletin at www.ncsbn.org .

Eric is right; However, I can give you a little more information on how the questions are developed, since that used to be my job.

The questions are never totally "changed out." They are reviewed on a regular basis. There are about 10,000 questions in the RN test pools and about 8500 in the PN test pools. About a fourth of the questions are reviewed every year. The review is done by a panel and again by a committee. Any questions (or items as they are called) that may have problems are referred to a higher level committe at National Council. Items are continually deleted from the pool and new items, written by item writing panels, are continually added. The review I am talking about is for content and style, primarily. There are also item reviews that are done for bias and sensitivity.

You'll never get the same question in a one-year period. Many items are similar, but no two items are exactly the same. That is also reviewed.

Hope that helps. If you need more info, let me know. But, please, do check out the website as Eric suggested. There is alot of good info there.

[jdeez42]

thank you for the responses, the reason i asked is because a couple of my friends have took the test recently and about 3 questions were about the same. It probably had the same content, just worded differently