National Council of State Boards of Nursing

But you don't have to wait on me.

This is actually up on the NCSBN website.

So you guys can go there, take a look yourself.

You can download it and review it at your leisure.

But if you're driving to the gym, you're on the subway, whatever, and you just want to listen, no problem.

I do plan on covering them, but I encourage you to be an advocate for yourself.

Go on the NCSBN website and take a look at the test plan yourself.

All right, so I already wrote down the page numbers of where all the questions are coming from just so we can get through this quicker.

I can start with that one because the CLECS was actually my dissertation project, my dissertation study, um, with data collection back in 2006.

And at that point in time, we were pretty new with simulation, and the National Council State Boards of Nursing and everybody else was saying, you know, can we substitute our traditional clinical hours with simulation? Um, so this conversation's been going on a long time.

But in my head, you needed to know if they were comparable or not before you could think about substituting anything.

How were they the same? How were they different? So, um, my advisor suggested a survey, and I, I said yes because I thought that sounded like the easiest thing to do, which, guess what? It wasn't.

We followed students after week seven when they were giving medications in the clinical setting, and students were statistically significantly better had less errors and near misses if they had had that simulation experience for the first seven weeks compared to just straight clinical.

And then you think years later, 2014, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing published the largest SIM study where they replaced up to 50% of clinical time.

And found that students were equally, if not better, in clinical in terms of safe practice than just students who had straight clinical.

But however, we really haven't moved and evolved in that way.

Yet more people are going into nursing.

280,308 people passed the NCLEX exam to become a registered nurse or a licensed practical nurse in 2025, a 34% increase from 2016, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.

Currently, 7 million registered nurses and practical nurses hold an active license in at least one state, according to the council.

but there were only about 3.4 million jobs for RNs in 2024, the most recent year for which data are available, and 651,400 jobs for LPNs and licensed vocational nurses the same year.

Distractions are destructions to your future.

So just to recap, so on this week, on Monday, we talked about how the NCSBN said that the 2026 conference happened, right? And there was a lot of data that was collected.

And there were over a million, 1 million NCLEX exams that were collected.

looked at, examined, and what they were trying to do is they're trying to measure what is important in clinical judgment, what makes a nursing student successful on the NCLEX, what are ways that they can answer the questions more correctly.