Relationship of Multiple Attempts on an Admissions Examination to Early Program Performance

When a student makes multiple attempts at an admissions assessment, an institution must decide how to incorporate the resulting information into its admissions decision. However, little research exists to guide this decision within a nursing admissions context.

This article examines patterns in retesting scores from a nursing admissions assessment and the correlations of four retesting score treatments with scores on an early program assessment.

Although test scores do increase with each subsequent attempt, the average of all attempt scores is more highly correlated, in almost all instances, with future performance in a nursing program than any one test score.

These results indicate that nursing programs presented with multiple scores from an examinee would be best served by using an average of all available scores when making admissions decisions. [J Nurs Educ. 2018;57(10):578-583.].