Introduction
Numerous studies have attempted to identify the best predictors of National Council Licensure Examination for
Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN) success. While the Bachelor of Science in nursing (BSN) literature is replete
with studies correlating relationships of NCLEX-RN success and failure to individual variables, the Associate
Degree in Nursing (ADN) literature is not as rich. The scarcity of research in this area may be due to the
NCLEX-RN examination itself. The evolution of the NCLEX-RN ‘pass-fail’ examination has raised two issues:
first, fewer studies have been conducted since the NCLEX-RN ‘pass-fail’ evaluation (Waterhouse and Beeman,
2003); and secondly, identifying predictors of NCLEX-RN success is less precise, suggesting that there are more
inconsistencies in predicting NCLEX-RN success with the ‘pass-fail’ evaluation (Crow, Handley, Morrison,
and Shelton, 2004). The purpose of this study was to compare graduates of a rural ADN program who were
successful on the initial attempt at NCLEX-RN to graduates who had failed their initial attempt at NCLEX-RN
using both admission and program criteria in an effort to identify predictors of NCLEX-RN success.