CRNA School NCE Pass Rates and Attrition

What is the NCE pass rate?

The National Certification Examination is the board exam administered by the NBCRNA. You cannot practise as a CRNA without passing it. A program's "first-time pass rate" is the percentage of its graduates who pass on their first attempt, and accredited programs are required by the COA to publish student-outcome data including this figure.

The crucial mechanical fact, and the one this whole page hangs on: the pass rate is calculated over the people who sit the exam. Students who left the program during year two never appear in the denominator. That is not a scandal — it is just arithmetic — but it means the pass rate cannot be interpreted without knowing how many students the program lost on the way there.

What the national numbers actually look like

28 programs publish no pass rate and 29 publish no attrition rate. We say this loudly because the alternative — quietly treating a blank as a zero, or as a failure — is how bad program rankings get built. Missing data is missing, not bad.

Why a 100% pass rate can be a warning sign

Do high-attrition programs actually get better pass rates? We checked.

The culling theory makes a testable prediction: programs that lose more students should post higher board pass rates. So we tested it across the 124 programs that publish both numbers. Here is the honest result.

There is no clear relationship. An r of -0.15 is negligible — and it points, faintly, in the opposite direction from the culling theory: programs with 100% pass rates average lower attrition (3.1%) than programs below 100% (4.4%). Across the profession as a whole, the data does not show programs buying their board numbers by shedding students. We are telling you this even though the opposite finding would have made a far better headline.

A small number of individual programs do report a perfect pass rate alongside double-digit attrition. We have deliberately not published that as a list of names, and we think you should be sceptical of anyone who does. We just showed the pattern doesn't hold across the profession, so pulling out the two or three programs that happen to fit it is finding a shape in noise — and at a small program, 10% attrition can be a single student who left for reasons that have nothing to do with the school.

What we can honestly give you is the method. Both numbers are on every program page, so read them together and ask the program directly:

• How many students started the most recent cohort, and how many finished on time?
• Of the students who left, how many withdrew and how many were dismissed for academic or clinical performance?
• What support exists for a student who is struggling — and at what point does the program decide someone can't continue?

An honest program will answer all three without flinching. A defensive answer tells you more than any statistic on this page.

Which CRNA programs have the strongest outcome data?

22 programs report the combination you actually want: a 100% first-time NCE pass rate and attrition of 5% or less. That is the pairing that cannot be gamed — you cannot post a perfect board rate while keeping almost everyone unless you are genuinely teaching well.

The lowest published NCE pass rates

Published pass rates run all the way down to 45%. Small cohorts distort these numbers badly — in a class of ten, two failures is an 80% pass rate — so treat a single low year as a question rather than a verdict, and ask for the three-year trend.

The combination we would actually worry about — a pass rate below 85% and attrition of 5% or more — describes 12 programs in our data: Arkansas State University (NCE 57.1%, attrition 10%); InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico (NCE 60%, attrition 14%); Lincoln Memorial University Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 67%, attrition 50%); Clarkson College Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 71%, attrition 12%); La Roche University Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 78%, attrition 5%); University of North Dakota Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 79%, attrition 5%); University of Tulsa Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 80%, attrition 6.7%); University of South Dakota (NCE 80%, attrition 10%); Case Western Reserve University Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 82%, attrition 14%); South College DNP Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 82.1%, attrition 13%); University Health/Truman Medical Center Nurse Anesthesia Program (NCE 83%, attrition 5%); Louisiana State University (NCE 84%, attrition 7%). Students there are being lost both during the program and at the exam. That is worth a very direct conversation before you accept a seat.

How to evaluate a CRNA program's outcomes in five minutes

1. 1. Find both numbers, not one. A pass rate without an attrition rate is half a sentence. Every program page on this site shows both where the program publishes them.
2. 2. Put them in the four-box grid above. High/low is the good box. High/high is the warning box. Low/high is the red flag.
3. 3. Adjust for cohort size. A 12-student program can swing 8 percentage points on one person. Ask for three years, not one.
4. 4. Ask the question out loud at interview. "How many students in the last three cohorts did not finish, and what happened to them?" A confident program answers this easily. Watch what happens when you ask.
5. 5. Do not punish a program for silence alone. 29 programs publish no attrition rate and 28 publish no pass rate. Ask them directly before you conclude anything.