The question bank has more than doubled
The bank is now just past two and a half thousand questions, which is more than double what it held a few weeks ago. About six hundred of those are numeracy and a little over nineteen hundred are clinical. It is worth explaining what that buys, because the number on its own is the least interesting thing about it.
The question that matters to somebody revising is not how many questions exist. It is how many mock papers you can sit before the bank starts handing you back questions you have already answered. Those are different numbers, and the second is much smaller than people expect, for a reason worth knowing. A paper is built to the NMC's own proportions, and a paper may not use the same proficiency statement twice inside a category. So what limits a paper is not how many questions a category holds but how many different statements it can reach. A category with sixty questions spread across six statements is thinner than it looks.
On top of that, we only retire a question for you when you answer it correctly in a mock. Get one wrong, or leave it blank, and it stays in your pool and comes round again, which is what you want from revision and which also means how far the bank goes depends on how you score.
So we measure it rather than counting it. A simulation runs the real paper generator for one student, over and over at an assumed score, until it cannot build another paper, and it repeats that across forty different orderings of the pool and for each nursing field's own pool separately. Ten papers in a row now come out on all forty orderings, at every score we model, for all four fields. It was five before this month's authoring. The honest caveat is that this is the simulation's answer: nobody has sat ten in a row to prove it, and we keep the pessimistic figure rather than the flattering one.
The other half of the work was where the questions went. There is no point adding four hundred questions to a topic that was already comfortable, so each batch was written against the cells the measurement named as the ones that ran out first. Those were mostly at the harder end of the clinical platforms, the questions asking you to evaluate a plan or decide between two defensible actions rather than recall a fact, which is also the half of the paper candidates tell us they were least ready for.
The reading grew with it. There are eleven reading decks now, one for each clinical platform plus numeracy, the annexes and medicines management, and every page carries the same proficiency statements the questions do. That is what lets a question you get wrong offer you the page that teaches it by name rather than sending you to a deck to go hunting.
Two things we are not claiming. These are our questions, written to the NMC's published test specification, and they are not the NMC's. And a bigger bank is not the same as being readier: ten papers you skim through are worth less than three you go back over properly. How a mock is put together and what the report tells you is written up if you want the detail.