World watch it, it's Nurse Kim

Me celebrating NCLEX passage

 On Wednesday at approximately 11:45 AM, after taking the NCLEX, answering 75 questions in about 45 minutes, I officially became an RN.  This has been a long and difficult road, the nails in the pavement being people that told me that this was something that I could not do, the gaping manhole the middle of the sidewalk being the hours spent as a CNA doing you-don't-want-to-know to get the tuition money to pay for this, and the crap in the middle of my path that I had to jump over being a little pile of poo named Jodi K.  But here I am, Kimberley Anne Gray, RN.  Doesn't rhyme, but it does have a much nicer ring to it.

The RN exam is truly a great exam.  They use something called "Computer Adaptive Testing" (CAT) that allows you to basically as as few of the questions as possible.  Back in the day, you would have to travel to a test site, book a hotel room, and then sit in a room with about a hundred others and take a long, written, paper-and-pencil exam.  You would turn it in, wait several months, and then finally get your result.  Totally lame.

Today, what happens is that the questions are scored in terms of difficulty.  There is a midline that indicates the lowest level of competency for a new RN.  Your first question is slightly below the midline.  If you get that right, you get a harder question.  If you get it wrong, you get an easier question.  The computer will try to pick a question that it feels you have a 50% chance of getting right.

You have a minimum of 75 questions, and a max of 265.  If, at the end of the 75 questions, you are above the minimum competency line, then you are granted a pass and the test cuts of.  Or, if you are well below the minimum competency rate at 75 questions, then the computer shuts off and you are granted a fail.  If you are around the line, then the computer keeps firing questions at you until it is either out of questions or your are well above or below the line for 60 questions.

So, while you are taking this test, your are constantly asking yourself "Am I getting easy questions or hard questions?"  Because, if the questions are easy, that means that you are bombing the test.  Of course, the questions might also be easy because you are incredibly smart and you think that they might be easy.  Or they might be easy because the person who grades the test deemed them hard when they are actually pretty easy.

In other words, trying to gauge your progress by the difficulty level of the question is kind of pointless.  You just have to wait for the results.

The results are available after 48 hours of starting the test.  The NCLEX testing crew really has us here, because they can really charge whatever they want by asking for a "Quick Results Fee" ($7.95 by Internet, $9.95 by phone) and they know that they will get that fee.  They didn't get mine, however!!  Nope, because after checking to see if my results were available, I finally just checked the OR BON (board of nursing) online registry the next morning to find that I had already been added.  OR BON rocks!!

If you don't believe me, then click here.

Now I just need to find a job.