What Is a Good HESI A2 Score?
6 min read · Updated
HESI A2 scores are reported as percentages, one for each section you sat, plus a cumulative average. Most nursing programs want 75 to 80 percent. Competitive ones want more, and a few will accept less.
But the number that decides your application is usually not the average.
Most programs score each section separately
This is the part people get wrong. A great many programs set a minimum on every required section, not just on the overall average. Under that rule an applicant with 92, 90, 88 and 68 is rejected, while one with 78 across the board is accepted — despite a lower average.
If your program works that way, your weakest section is your score. Revision time is best spent on whichever section is furthest below the minimum, even though that is invariably the section you least want to work on.
Check which rule your program uses
Some average across sections, some set a floor on each, and some do both. It changes your entire study strategy, and it is one line in an email to admissions.
Rough bands
| Score | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| 90%+ | Strong at any program. Competitive for selective BSN admission. |
| 80–89% | Comfortably above most requirements. |
| 75–79% | Meets the common minimum. Fine for many programs, tight for competitive ones. |
| 70–74% | Below the usual bar. Accepted by some programs; check yours. |
| Below 70% | Likely to need a retake for most nursing programs. |
These are general ranges gathered from published admissions material, not a promise about any particular school. We deliberately do not publish per-school cut-offs: they change every intake, and someone deciding whether to retake on the basis of a stale figure could lose a year over it. Your program's own page is the only source worth trusting.
How many times can you take it?
Elsevier does not set a universal limit — your program does. Two attempts per application cycle is common, often with a waiting period of 30 to 60 days between them. Some allow three. Some allow one.
Find out before you sit it the first time, because it changes how you should treat that attempt. If you get one shot per cycle, going in underprepared to 'see what it is like' can cost you an entire year.
Where marks are actually lost
In our experience of the exam blueprint, two sections account for most failed attempts. Anatomy & Physiology is dense and unforgiving — it rewards knowing systems properly rather than recognizing terms. And Mathematics catches people out not because the math is hard, but because dosage calculation and unit conversion punish small slips heavily under time pressure.
Vocabulary is the section people most often under-prepare, because it feels unstudyable. It is not: the words that come up are drawn heavily from clinical and health-science usage, and they are learnable.
The fastest way to find out where you stand is to sit a full, timed section and look at the breakdown rather than guessing.