Author · 205 posts
RN · Medical-Surgical nurse & health writer
Meet Nathan, a registered nurse with over five years of experience in Medical-Surgical care, based in New York City. Having worked with a wide range of patients through some of their most vulnerable moments, Nathan brings a grounded, real-world perspective to his writing on healthcare. His goal is simple: to bridge the gap between medical knowledge and everyday understanding, making health topics feel less intimidating and more empowering for everyone. When he's not caring for patients, Nathan channels his passion for medicine into writing that educates, comforts and inspires.
NCLEX registration is two applications running in parallel, not one after the other, and treating it as sequential turns a two-week wait into six or eight. Here is the board-side path in order, what each of the three organizations actually does, and the four mistakes that cost candidates time or their fee.
The Pearson VUE fee is $200 and that is only the start. Board application fees, background checks, transcript and jurisprudence charges push most first-time US candidates to between $325 and $700, and every fee is non-refundable. Here is the full picture, including international surcharges.
Every HESI A2 registration runs through Elsevier's Evolve platform, but who schedules and who takes payment depends on your program. Here are the school, ProctorU and Prometric paths step by step, plus the section, ID, payment and retake details worth confirming before you pay.
Repeat candidates pass at roughly half the first-time rate, and the gap is about method rather than effort. Your Candidate Performance Report names the categories that cost you the exam, which turns a vague sense of failure into a specific, weighted study plan for the second attempt.
Endocrine items test whether you can separate conditions that share a presenting sign and demand opposite actions. DKA against HHS, Addison's against Cushing's, SIADH against diabetes insipidus, with comparison tables and six practice questions carrying a rationale on every answer option.
Computer adaptive testing chooses your next NCLEX question, sets how long the exam runs, and produces the pass or fail decision. Three rules end an exam, 15 unscored pretest items hide among the scored ones, and no submitted answer can be revisited. Here is the mechanism, without the mythology.
California is not a compact state, so a multistate license from anywhere else grants no practice rights here. Every route runs through the BRN and BreEZe: exam and endorsement fees, the fingerprint step that stalls most applications, the 6 to 12 week timeline, and two-year renewal with no grace period.
Critical-care nursing means caring for patients who often cannot tell you what has changed, so you work from monitors, trends and your own assessment. Here is what the role involves across MICU, SICU, CICU and trauma units, what CCRN requires, and what the salary data actually supports.
ACLS is the American Heart Association's framework for adults in acute life-threatening distress, picking up where BLS stops. It adds manual ECG interpretation, advanced airways, code medications and formal team roles, and for most acute-care nurses it is a condition of employment rather than an elective.
The NCLEX passing standard is a fixed criterion, not a curve. NCSBN's Board sets it and reviews it every three years: 0.00 logits for the RN exam and -0.18 for the PN, both running through March 31, 2029. You clear a line set before you registered, rather than being ranked against your cohort.
Biology is worth nine scored questions on the TEAS 7 Science section, roughly 20% of the 44 scored items. The content stays at cellular and molecular level, but supply-answer questions remove the multiple-choice safety net, which makes active recall non-negotiable here.
An RN-to-BSN is a degree-completion track for nurses who already hold a license: it builds on credits you have earned rather than restarting the degree, runs fully online in 12 to 24 months, and is frequently covered by employer tuition reimbursement in exchange for a service commitment.
