Close the practice-readiness gap with HESI Clinical Practice Readiness Assessment

The HESI Clinical Practice Readiness Assessment (CPRA) is a first-of-its-kind, standardized tool for evaluating whether graduating nursing students are ready to enter clinical practice before taking the NCLEX. It uses high-fidelity, screen-based patient simulations with a natural language conversation engine — allowing students to engage with patients with diverse conditions and backgrounds - alongside Next-Generation NCLEX-style questions to reliably assess clinical competency across five key construct areas readiness: Assessment, Safety, Education, Communication, and Clinical Judgment.

HESI CPRA evaluates students on the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) which represent “ready for practice”. Following the assessment, CPRA uses a consistent, standardize rubric to evaluate performance across four-mastery levels — Emerging, Developing, Proficient, and Advanced providing an objective evaluation of each student's clinical competence. Both student-level and faculty-level reports are generated, highlighting overarching mastery and mastery across the five key constructs with faculty reports providing class-wide performance insights including student performance distribution and areas needing support, making it actionable for curriculum improvement.

HESI CPRA is aligned with the AACN Essentials competency framework, enabling nursing programs to demonstrate student outcomes across varied patient contexts and support accreditation reporting requirements. By successfully providing care for all five virtual patients, students will have demonstrated key AACN Essentials competencies that are indicative of practice readiness. Instructors will also have evidence of demonstrated student outcomes across a range of patient contexts as evidence of students having the skills they need to succeed as new nurses.

Unlike traditional knowledge-based exams, HESI CPRA uses immersive simulations of realistic patient scenarios — including a natural language conversation engine that requires students to respond as they would in an actual clinical – and answer dedicated decision checkpoints – in the style of NGN items - corresponding to the patients’ condition and scenario. . This approach enables CPRA to evaluates the level of applied clinical judgment and interpersonal communication skills that matter most for safe, effective entry-level nursing practice, not just content recall.

HESI CPRA reporting provides faculty with class-wide performance insights that identify areas of strength and weakness across all graduating students, as well as potential curriculum gaps that may require attention. By analyzing trends in student performance across the five constructs, nursing programs can make targeted, data-informed adjustments to their curriculum to best prepare future cohorts for both the NCLEX and the realities of clinical practice. The assessment is delivered through market-leading secure browser technology, ensuring a valid, reliable, and consistent evaluation experience that faculty can trust as an objective measure of practice readiness.