How to Study for the HESI A2: Find Your Version First

Before you review a single topic, find out which HESI A2 your own program actually gives: which sections it requires, what each of those sections has to score, and how long the sitting runs. Then review only those sections, practice them under section-by-section timing, and read the retake policy before test day rather than after it.

That order matters more here than on almost any other entrance exam, because the HESI A2 is not one fixed test. The Health Education Systems, Inc. Admission Assessment is built by Elsevier out of a menu of up to eight possible academic subjects, and each nursing or allied-health program picks its own combination of them, sets its own passing thresholds, and ends up with its own exam length. Two applicants who both say they are studying for the HESI A2 may be preparing for genuinely different papers.

What is on the HESI A2?

Up to eight academic subject sections, plus a separate Learning Style and Personality Profile component that is not scored as an admission criterion. The eight are Math, Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary and General Knowledge, Grammar, Anatomy and Physiology, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Almost nobody sits all of them. Programs commonly require four to six, and which four to six is a decision made school by school.

The rest of the format is steadier. The exam is computer-based and proctored, and it is typically administered at the testing or assessment center of the school you are applying to rather than at a third-party center, which is one reason the program itself is the right place to send your questions. Total length follows directly from the section count: a test built from a handful of subjects can run around two hours, while the full battery can run four and a half to six hours or more.

It helps to place this exam in the pipeline. The HESI A2 is a gate at the front of nursing training, sat by applicants before a program admits them, and the exam at the far end of that training is the exact opposite case: one national licensing exam taken in the same form by everyone, which our guide to studying for the NCLEX works through. Advice for a single national exam travels well between candidates. Advice for an admission assessment each school assembles for itself does not, and that is the whole reason this guide starts where it does.

Step 1: Find out exactly which HESI A2 your school gives

This is the highest-value hour of the entire preparation, and it is the one most people skip because it does not feel like studying. Email the nursing department or read the admissions page properly, and come away with four specific things written down: the exact list of sections required, the passing score attached to each one, the expected length and format of the sitting, and the retake policy.

The reason that information is so hard to find in one national place is visible in how the exam is sold. Elsevier markets the HESI Admission Assessment to nursing programs as a way for a program to evaluate applicants on the knowledge areas that matter to that program. The customer is the school, and the configuration is theirs. So the authoritative specification for the test you personally will sit is not published anywhere national. It lives in the admissions material of the program you are applying to.

Skipping this step costs in both directions, and both are expensive. Study the full menu and you may spend real weeks on Physics for a program that never tests Physics, which is time taken directly out of the sections that will decide your application. Assume every version looks alike and you may walk in with light preparation on Anatomy and Physiology, which is the section nursing programs most commonly require and often weight heavily.

If you are applying to more than one program, gather the requirements for each and work from the union rather than the average. Review every section that any of your programs requires, and aim at the strictest threshold among them. That single decision usually settles most of what your study plan should contain.

Why the HESI A2 needs a different plan from the TEAS

The two exams get discussed as interchangeable nursing entrance tests, and for the purposes of choosing what to do next they are not. The ATI TEAS is a different exam from a different company, and it is standardized in a way the HESI A2 is not: four fixed sections, the same length and structure for every test taker, everywhere. Roughly six in ten nursing programs use the TEAS and roughly four in ten use the HESI A2, so many applicants only ever need to prepare for one of the two, provided they confirm early which one their target programs actually require.

If your programs turn out to want the TEAS instead, the plan shifts to a different shape and our guide to studying for the TEAS test lays that one out. If they want the HESI A2, keep reading, and treat the section list you collected in step one as the boundary of everything that follows.

Step 2: Review only the sections your program requires

With the list in hand, the review becomes small enough to plan. Here is an honest map of what each possible section covers, so you can size the work for the ones that apply to you and ignore the rest with a clear conscience.

• Math. Arithmetic in the shapes nursing work uses, including conversions and dosage-style calculation, alongside basic algebra. Accuracy under a clock matters more than sophistication.
• Reading Comprehension. Passage-based questions, so the skill being tested is pulling meaning out of text you have never seen rather than recalling anything you studied.
• Vocabulary and General Knowledge. General vocabulary with medical and health terminology frequently in the mix, which makes it one of the few sections where rote term drilling is genuinely the right tool.
• Grammar. Parts of speech and sentence structure. Usually the fastest section to move if it is weak, because the rule set is finite.
• Anatomy and Physiology. General high-school to introductory-college content, and the science section nursing programs most commonly require. If it is on your list, it deserves the largest share of your hours.
• Biology, Chemistry and Physics. General high-school to introductory-college science content in each case. These are the sections where confirming the requirement first pays off most obviously, since Physics in particular is easy to study for months without ever being asked to sit it.

How you review matters as much as what you review, and for the science and vocabulary sections the choice is stark: rereading a chapter until it feels familiar produces a feeling of readiness that a timed section will not honor. Our comparison of active recall versus spaced repetition covers why pulling facts back out of memory, at widening intervals, is what makes them available under pressure. For the section most likely to be on your list, a structured approach to studying anatomy by body system keeps the material organized rather than turning into a pile of unrelated terms.

What is a passing score on the HESI A2?

There is no single one, and this is the second place where assuming a national standard gets people into trouble. Scoring is percentage-based per section, and passing thresholds are set by each school individually. They commonly sit somewhere in the 75 to 80 percent range, though some programs accept as low as 62 percent and others require 85 to 90 percent or higher on particular sections.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the only score worth planning against is the one published by your program, so treat any number you see quoted online as a description of some other school until you have checked your own. Second, because results are reported per section, ask whether your program judges each section against its own threshold, uses a composite figure, or does both. That answer decides whether a strong performance in Reading can carry a shaky performance in Chemistry, or whether every required section has to clear the bar on its own merits, which is a very different target to aim at.

Step 3: Practice under section-by-section time pressure

Sections on the HESI A2 are typically timed individually rather than the whole exam running as one continuous block, and that changes what practice should look like. On a single-block exam the thing to rehearse is stamina and the redistribution of minutes across a long paper. Here, minutes do not travel. Finishing Grammar with fifteen minutes to spare buys you nothing at all in Anatomy and Physiology.

So practice one section at a time, against that section clock, and treat each one as a self-contained event with its own pacing rule. The failure mode you are training out is the one where you sink eight minutes into three hard early items and then rush the back half of a section you actually knew. That pattern is invisible when you practice untimed and obvious the moment you put a clock on a single section.

Afterwards, do the part that converts a practice score into a plan. Sort every miss by cause rather than by topic: content you never learned, content you learned and lost, a question you misread, or an item you knew and ran out of clock for. Those four causes call for four different fixes and only the first one means more reviewing. Our guide to reviewing a practice test with an error log works through the mechanics, and on a per-section exam it is worth running that sort separately for each section, because pacing problems are usually specific to one or two of them rather than general.

Step 4: Know what a retake looks like before you sit

Retake rules are set by each school, exactly like the section list and the passing scores. Most programs allow at least one retake, and a waiting period of roughly 30 to 90 days between attempts along with a cap of two or three attempts per year is common, but none of that is a universal rule you can rely on. Read the actual policy for your program, and read it before your first attempt rather than after a disappointing result, because a strict cap changes how prepared you should be when you first sit down.

Two questions are worth asking the program directly, since only the school can settle them and no national rule does: whether a retake means resitting every required section or only the section that fell short, and which result is used when more than one exists. Both change the arithmetic of whether to sit early and treat the first attempt as information, or to wait until you are confident across the board.

If a section does fall short, the waiting period is the opportunity, not the punishment. The least useful response is repeating the same review that produced the result, at the same intensity, and hoping the number moves. The useful response is narrow: take the one or two sections that missed, work out from your practice whether the cause was content, pacing or misreading, and drill that specific thing under the same section timing you will face again.

Building section-scoped study sets with GeniusPal

Once step one has given you the actual section list, a real advantage opens up: you can stop studying the HESI A2 in general and start studying your HESI A2 specifically. Generic all-purpose prep is built for the full menu, which means a good part of it is content your school never tests, and the hours you spend there are hours not spent on the sections that decide the application.

GeniusPal closes that gap by working from material you choose. Upload the review material for one required section, an anatomy and physiology study guide, a grammar workbook chapter, the class notes you kept from a chemistry course, and it turns that into a quiz, a set of flashcards, or a recall drill built only from what you gave it. PDF, Word, PowerPoint, plain text, Markdown and CSV files all go in, up to 10 MB. Then run the set cold a few days later, which is the step that tells you whether the section is holding or only felt like it was.

A new account gets two study-set generations for the lifetime of the account before anything is paid for, which is enough to build a drill for the two sections that worry you most. Paid plans lift that to 100 generations a month on Student, or a generous fair-use allowance on Genius for anyone drilling several sections at once.

Be clear about what it does not do. GeniusPal builds recall from the material you supply, so it cannot tell you which sections your school requires, what the passing thresholds are, or how long your sitting will run, and it is not a substitute for official HESI practice from Elsevier or the third-party prep that many applicants use alongside it. Step one is still yours to do, and it stays the most valuable thing in this guide: find out exactly which HESI A2 you are sitting, and everything after it becomes a much smaller, much more winnable piece of work.