Nursing pre-requs

[alexf.1990]

That is all consistent with my research and experience as well.  A college (especially a community college) will have their overall policies (like accepting CLEP) but a nursing department sets its own admission standards.  Unlike community colleges, nursing programs are not open enrollment. They will be competitive admissions and almost always rank applicants based on GPA.  Since there are no CLEP exams for A&P or Microbiology, it's moot, but for the schools that want intro bio / intro chem as A&P prereqs, you can *probably* use CLEP because it isn't part of your prereq package at most schools.  

I looked at this problem backwards and forwards for several years- I took every science via distance learning.  I took *extra* because I wasn't 100% sure at the time if I was going into nursing or medicine (turns out, I did neither) but even having a degree didn't give he a big advantage because I needed ALL the sciences.  It took a long time and cost a lot of money- so to do them twice scrambles my brain.

The differing policies between schools always causes a headache. I've only looked at the nursing programs that are available in my area, so I'm not sure what the norm is. UNCW calculates the GPA of your prereq courses in order to rank you for admissions. They will let you CLEP out of a prereq. The course simply won't be calculated into your relevant GPA. As you said, there is a limit to this anyway because only prereq courses like Life Span Development, Psychology, and a few Humanities courses have CLEPs available for them. It also puts you at a bit of a disadvantage to CLEP out of the fluff courses because you can't use the higher grades in those courses to offset grades in courses like A&P.

Even the community college programs in my area are competitive and have fairly long waiting lists. With the growing shortage of nurses, I'm surprised they aren't opening up more programs. WGU has a decent program, but they're limited to the handful of areas where WGU has hospitals willing to do clinicals with their students.