NCLEX Pass-Rate Index: How ScrubScope Computes It

Reviewed May 22, 2026 by the ScrubScope editorial team.

The NCLEX Pass-Rate Index is a single 0-to-100 number ScrubScope attaches to a nursing school. It is not a rating we assign by judgment. It is computed by a script from public first-time NCLEX-RN pass rates, using a formula stated in full on this page. If you want to know exactly how a school got its number, this page is the answer, and the raw inputs the script reads are kept on file as the evidence trail behind every score.

We publish this page because a derived score is only worth trusting if its computation is open. You should be able to read the formula, find the source data, and reproduce the result yourself. Nothing here is proprietary.

What the NCLEX Pass-Rate Index measures, and what it does not

The index measures one thing: how a school's first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate compares to the national first-time pass rate, weighted toward recent cohorts. The NCLEX-RN is the licensure examination a graduate must pass to practice as a registered nurse, and the first-time pass rate is the share of a school's first-attempt candidates who pass. A school whose recent cohorts pass at the national rate scores 50. A school well above the national rate scores higher, a school well below scores lower.

That is the entire scope of the index. It is worth being just as clear about what it does not measure.

It is not accreditation. Accreditation by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education or the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing is a separate, binary status, and a school either holds it or does not. The index does not check or replace it.

It is not a quality guarantee. A pass rate reflects how a past cohort performed on one exam. It does not predict your individual result, and it says nothing about clinical placement support, faculty access, cost, or whether a program fits your schedule.

It is not admissions advice. We do not tell you which school to attend. The index is one sourced signal among several on a school's page, and the other signals, cost, format, accreditation, placement model, often matter more to a working RN's decision.

Where the data comes from

The index draws on two kinds of public data, and both are cited on the school pages that display a score.

The national baseline is the national first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate for registered-nurse candidates, published by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing^[1]. The NCSBN is the body that develops and administers the NCLEX, and it reports first-time pass rates by candidate type each year. We record one baseline figure per reporting year.

The per-school rates come from state boards of nursing. Most state boards publish annual NCLEX pass rates for the nursing programs they approve, and those board reports are the source for a school's first-time rate^[2]. We record the reporting year alongside every rate so the data vintage is never ambiguous.

Every figure that feeds the index is stored in a raw inputs file with its source and the date it was retrieved. The index script reads only that file. No rate is hand-typed into a school record, and no rate is estimated. If a board has not published a school's rate for a year, that year is simply absent.

First-time vs all-taker rates

A board may report two different pass rates. The first-time rate counts only candidates taking the NCLEX for the first time. The all-taker rate also counts repeat attempts, so it tends to run higher because some candidates who failed initially pass on a later try.

The index uses first-time rates only. The first-time rate is the cleaner signal of how well a program prepared a cohort to pass on the first attempt, and it is the figure NCSBN reports for the national baseline, so school and baseline are measured the same way. Mixing an all-taker school rate against a first-time baseline would not be a like-for-like comparison.

When a state board reports only an all-taker rate for a school and no first-time figure, we do not compute an index for that school. We do not convert an all-taker rate into a first-time estimate. The school's page simply carries no index, which is the honest outcome when the matching data does not exist.

The formula

The script computes the index in steps. The constants are stated here so the calculation is fully reproducible.

Take the school's first-time pass rates, sort them newest year first, and keep the three most recent. Apply recency weights by how many years are available: for three years, the weights are 0.5, 0.3, and 0.2 from newest to oldest; for two years, 0.6 and 0.4; for one year, 1.0. A school with fewer than two years of first-time data gets no index.

Compute the recency-weighted school rate, R, as the sum of each weight times that year's school rate. Compute the recency-weighted national baseline, B, the same way, using the national first-time rate for the same years. Then take the ratio:

ratio = R / B

A ratio of 1.00 means the school matched the national rate. Above 1.00 is above the national rate, below is below it. The ratio is mapped to a 0-to-100 score:

score = clamp(50 + (ratio - 1) * 250, 0, 100)

The clamp holds the result between 0 and 100. There are exactly two modeling constants. The 50 is the midpoint: a school exactly at the national rate scores 50. The 250 is the multiplier that sets how steeply the score moves away from 50. We chose 250 because a school 20 points of pass-rate above the national baseline is the practical ceiling of observed variation, so we map it to 100. That is, a ratio of 1.20 reaches 100, and a ratio of 0.80 reaches 0. A ratio of 1.00 sits at 50.

The recency weights, 0.5, 0.3, and 0.2, are a documented modeling choice rather than a derived constant, and the next section explains them. The 50 and 250 are the only constants in the score mapping, and they are not tuned per school. Every school runs through the identical formula.

Recency weighting rationale

The index weights recent cohorts more heavily, and it does so deliberately.

A nursing program changes over time. Faculty turn over, curricula are revised, admissions standards shift, and a program on a state board's watch list may improve or decline. A pass rate from four or five years ago describes a program that may no longer exist in the same form. The most recent cohort is the best available evidence of how the program performs now.

At the same time, a single year is noisy, especially for a small program where a few candidates swing the rate by several points. Averaging the three most recent years smooths that noise while still leaning on current data. The 0.5, 0.3, 0.2 weighting is the compromise: the latest year carries half the score, the prior two years carry the rest, and a strong or weak result from years ago no longer dominates. When only one or two years are available, the weights are rescaled to sum to one so the score stays on the same 0-to-100 footing.

Limitations

The index is one signal, and it has real limits a reader should hold in mind.

Cohort-size noise is the largest. A program graduating a small class can post a pass rate that swings widely year to year for reasons unrelated to teaching quality. The three-year weighting reduces this but does not remove it, and an index from a small program should be read as a rough band, not a precise rank.

State attribution is imperfect for online programs. A board reports rates for the programs it approves, and an online program drawing students nationwide may have its candidates counted under more than one board, or under the state where it is chartered rather than where students live. We use the board figure that names the program, but the attribution is a known caveat for distance programs.

Data lag is built in. State boards publish on annual cycles, and a board's most recent report may already be a year or more old. The index reflects the most recent published data, not this term's cohort.

Limited-data exclusions are by design. A school with fewer than two years of first-time data, or one for which a board reports only all-taker rates, gets no index at all. We would rather show nothing than show a number we cannot stand behind.

Coverage is still growing. The index currently covers 144 accredited pre-licensure BSN programs in six states, Texas, California, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, drawn from the Texas Board of Nursing, the California Board of Registered Nursing, the Florida Board of Nursing, the New York State Education Department Office of the Professions, the Pennsylvania State Board of Nursing, and the Ohio Board of Nursing reports, and that coverage expands to additional state boards as their data is sourced. A school with no index yet may simply sit in a state we have not added.

State boards do not all report on the same calendar. The Texas, Florida, New York, and Ohio boards report by calendar year. The California board reports by an annual period running July to June, and the Pennsylvania board by an examination year running October to September, so the periods from those two boards are mapped to the nearest calendar year to line up with the calendar-year national baseline. That mapping is a deliberate modeling choice, not a sourced fact, and a California or Pennsylvania school's index is best read as a close approximation rather than a same-calendar-year figure. The raw inputs file records the mapping for every California and Pennsylvania school. The Texas, Florida, New York, and Ohio schools carry no such mapping because their boards already report by calendar year.

Update cadence

The index is re-pulled annually, as state boards and NCSBN publish each year's results, typically rolling out over the first months of a calendar year. When a new year of data is added, the script recomputes every school's score from the refreshed raw inputs file.

Every page that shows an index also shows the data vintage, the most recent reporting year behind the score, so you can see how current the figure is. If a school's index looks stale against a year you know a board has since published, the annual re-pull has not yet reached that board's data.

How to verify

You do not have to take the index on faith. The national first-time NCLEX-RN pass rate is published by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing at ncsbn.org^[3], and its exam-statistics pages carry the figures we use as the baseline. For a specific school, your own state board of nursing publishes program-level pass rates, and NCSBN maintains the directory of boards so you can find yours^[2].

With those two sources and the formula above, you can reproduce any index on this site. If your figures differ from ours, the likely cause is a newer board report than our last annual pull, and we would treat that as a correction to make. For how ScrubScope ranks and presents schools more broadly, see the nurse practitioner hub and the school pages, each of which carries its own sourced data.