Good on the NCCAA for doing the right thing here. Once they had evidence the June exam was compromised, invalidating it was probably the only defensible option.
But I really feel for the AAs who did everything right. They studied, took the exam honestly, passed, and now have to do it all over again because other people had access to exam content beforehand. That sucks.
What I do not understand is why the NCCAA is still using a fixed-form 180-question exam instead of computerized adaptive testing.
The NBCRNA NCE is adaptive. The NCLEX has been adaptive since 1994. Other high-stakes healthcare certification exams use adaptive testing as well. Australia and Canada medical exams are adaptive. Questions are pulled dynamically from a large calibrated bank based on candidate performance, so compromising one exam form becomes far less useful. It does not make cheating impossible, but it makes this exact type of widespread compromise much harder.
The other interesting piece is the pass-rate history. NCCAA reports a 92.8% first-time pass rate for 2024-25, while ARC-AA reports a 99.9% three-year average overall exam pass rate for programs graduating in 2022-24.
For comparison, the NBCRNA first-time NCE pass rate was 89.3% in 2024 and 90.5% in 2025.
None of that means high CAA pass rates equal cheating. They do not. But once you confirm that actual exam content was circulating before an administration, I think it is completely reasonable to start asking questions about item reuse, exam security, the size of the item bank, and whether a fixed-form exam is still appropriate.
To NCCAA’s credit, their forensic review looked at 20 administration windows and they have only identified June 2026 as compromised.
Still, this seems like a pretty strong argument for moving to adaptive testing.
