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Is Puerto Rico’s Nurse Licensing Exam Equivalent to the NCLEX-RN®?

That’s a question the National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) has been trying to answer. A “yes” decision would certainly be good news for Puerto Rican nurses who emigrate to the U.S. and hope to continue their practice here. Unfortunately, after conducting a comparison study between the NCLEX-RN and the Puerto Rico Board of Nursing Registered Nurse Licensure Examinations for two years, the NCSBN has concluded that it does not have enough information to make a final determination--but based on what it does know, the answer would probably be “no.”

In a progress report posted on its Web site (https://www.ncsbn.org/PuertoRicoExamComparison.pdf), NCSBN attributes the problem to the fact that the Puerto Rico Board of Nursing has not provided all the information NCSBN has requested. Therefore, it concludes, “because of [several] open issues and lack of data, NCSBN cannot provide currently a definitive assessment of whether the Puerto Rico Board of Nursing Registered Nurse Licensure Examinations are substantially equivalent to the NCLEX-RN examination. Information collected to date does not support a determination of equivalency.”

What are these unresolved “open issues”? For one thing, the Puerto Rican exam is produced in Spanish while the NCLEX-RN is produced exclusively in English. According to NCSBN, “testing standards strongly warn against treating results from tests given in different languages as equivalent.” Furthermore, the NCLEX-RN is a single exam used to assess competence for a single level of licensure. In Puerto Rico, two exams are used, for two distinct levels of licensure. “It is unknown how, or if, the single level of RN licensure used in all other jurisdictions is comparable to the bifurcated licensure model used in Puerto Rico,” NCSBN notes.

Other comparisons between the NCLEX-RN and the Puerto Rican exams that remain unresolved due to insufficient data include:

• Equivalency of the scopes of practice in the U.S. and in Puerto Rico

• Equivalency in exam validation

• Equivalency in exam security measures

• Equivalency in assessment standards and passing rates.