How to Use a Blueprint

I remember getting the blueprint for my first exam and thinking: oh, that's nice. What am I supposed to do with this?

If you haven't received one yet, you should receive a blueprint from your instructors around a week before your content exams (if not, feel free to ask).

This is a document that is generated after an exam has been written/finalized and gives you a very general idea about what will be on the test.

The first section of the blueprint is organized by Concept/Exemplar. In bold, you will find the concept with the exemplars listed below. The number of questions for each exemplar will be to the right.

I like to write out all of the exemplars and how many questions each one has in order from highest-to-lowest. This can help you predict what topics will appear on the test more often so you can spend more time studying or doing questions over those.

The second section of the blueprint is organized by Outcomes. Look for "Clinical Areas" in bold. This part of the blueprint is useful because that list matches your ATI books.

For example, it might say under Clinical Areas that Mental Health will have 22 questions. This tells me the majority of the questions on the exam will come from the ATI book titled RN Mental Health Nursing. In term one, a lot of questions will probably come from the Clinical Area Fundamentals aka the ATI book titled Fundamentals for Nursing. If you haven't started making a study guide yet, this will make it easier for you to know what ATI books you need to look in for your exemplars and how to divide your study time.

I have found that the rest of the blueprint is too general to be helpful, but please feel free to reach out to an officer and let us know how you're using the exam blueprints!