RefNurse

A plain reference for nursing school prerequisites

A plain reference for nursing school prerequisites

RefNurse is a small reference site about one narrow, confusing topic: the coursework you have to finish before a nursing program will look at your application.

Every school publishes its own prerequisite list, and the lists look different enough that people reasonably assume the requirements are random. They mostly are not. Underneath the local variation there is a standard science-and-social-science core, a set of non-course requirements that schools handle at admission, and a credit-accounting system that decides whether the course you already took counts.

This site explains those three things in plain language. The guide pages each answer one concrete question — what the prerequisite courses actually are, whether they can be taken online, which science courses carry the most weight and why, and how credit hours, GPA calculations, and course-recency rules work.

The tool is a credit hour converter. Nursing programs state their requirements in semester credits, but community colleges and universities on quarter calendars issue quarter credits, and syllabi often describe courses in lecture, lab, and clinical contact hours instead. The converter translates between those units so you can tell at a glance whether a four-quarter-credit microbiology course satisfies a three-semester-credit requirement.

RefNurse is reference material about an admissions process. It does not rank schools, recommend programs, or give clinical or career advice — your prospective program's registrar and nursing advisor decide what counts.

Credit Hour Converter

Nursing programs publish prerequisite requirements in semester credit hours. Schools on a quarter calendar issue quarter credits, and course syllabi often describe the same course in weekly lecture, laboratory, or clinical contact hours. Enter a number in any unit below to see the equivalent in the others, using the conversion standards most US registrars apply.

These are the common conversion standards, not a ruling. Only the registrar and nursing department of the school you are applying to can decide how a specific course transfers, and articulation agreements between particular schools may override the usual math.