The best place to study for the NLN PAX.

The National League for Nursing (NLN) Nursing Entrance Exam (NEX) is used by some nursing schools to assess the academic abilities of student applicants. It is not the only evaluation tool, but it is used in conjunction with other criteria.

The NLN NEX consists of three sections that evaluate your reading comprehension, math, and science skills. In each section, there are between five and eight unscored items, but you will not know which these are. You will have 60 minutes to complete each section, and you will take all three sections during one exam administration. There is no penalty for incorrect answers. Here is a breakdown of the exam sections, including a general description, the number of questions in the section, and the percentage of the entire exam for each section.

• Verbal—This section contains 50 questions, with 25 on word knowledge and 25 assessing reading comprehension. It makes up about 34% of the entire exam.

• Math—The math section covers the broad areas of numbers and operations, measurement (with conversions), algebra, and data and information. There are 40 questions, and the math section accounts for about 28% of the exam.

• Science—The questions in this exam section come from the areas of biology, human anatomy, human physiology, chemistry, and health. These 55 questions make up about 38% of the entire exam.

The NLN NEX is the new name for the exam that was previously called the NLN PAX. Besides the rebranding, there have been several other changes that are mostly structural. Each section is now 60 minutes long instead of 40. In the NLN NEX, there are the same number of questions in the Science section as were in the NLN PAX, five more questions in the Math section, and two fewer questions in the Verbal section.

The renaming of this exam also brings minor changes to the content tested, including these:

• Verbal—The word knowledge part of the Verbal section now assesses more than vocabulary and includes using context clues and employing root words, prefixes, and suffixes to decode a word. There is one less passage in the reading comprehension part of this section and five fewer comprehension questions.

• Science—There are no longer any physics questions in this exam section. This section also contains fewer chemistry questions than the NLN PAX and nearly double the number of anatomy and physiology questions.

• Math—Geometry and mathematical concepts questions have been removed from the Math section, and the number of questions on numbers and operations has been reduced by over half. Instead, there has been an increase in the number of questions concerning measurement (conversions) and algebra. Additionally, a new source of questions has been added: data and information. A basic, four-function calculator is allowed.