Preparing for nursing school means tackling two major entrance exams: the HESI A2 (Health Education Systems, Inc. Admission Assessment) and the ATI TEAS (Test of Essential Academic Skills). Both tests evaluate the foundational academic skills nursing programs require, and both reward candidates who study from real practice material. A printable PDF lets you work through questions anywhere — during a lunch break, on public transit, or away from a screen.
This page walks you through every subject area covered on these exams, explains how the two tests differ, and gives you a free PDF download packed with practice questions and detailed answer explanations.
Both exams test your ability to work with numbers in healthcare-relevant contexts. You'll need to be comfortable with fractions, decimals, ratios, and percentages — the building blocks of medication dosage calculations. Expect basic algebra questions that ask you to solve for an unknown variable, and proportion problems that mirror real nursing unit-conversion tasks. Dosage calculation questions on the HESI A2 go further, requiring you to convert between units (mg to mcg, mL to L) and calculate infusion rates.
Nursing professionals read medical records, research articles, and patient-education materials every day. The reading section evaluates your ability to identify the main idea of a passage, draw inferences from evidence, locate supporting details, recognize the author's purpose, and use context clues to determine the meaning of vocabulary. Passages are drawn from health, science, and social-science topics.
Clear written communication is a patient-safety issue. Questions in this section cover grammar rules (subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, verb tense consistency), sentence structure (run-ons, fragments, parallel construction), punctuation (commas, semicolons, apostrophes), and spelling of commonly confused medical and general vocabulary words.
The science section is the most content-heavy part of both exams. Biology questions cover cell structure (organelle functions, cell membrane transport — diffusion, osmosis, active transport), genetics (Mendelian inheritance, dominant vs. recessive traits, Punnett squares), and basic biology concepts (photosynthesis, cellular respiration). Chemistry topics include the periodic table (element groups, atomic structure, electronegativity), and chemical equations (balancing equations, types of reactions, stoichiometry basics). Anatomy and Physiology questions provide an overview of major body systems: cardiovascular, respiratory, digestive, urinary, nervous, endocrine, musculoskeletal, and immune systems. Physics basics appear on the HESI A2 and include concepts such as speed, velocity, acceleration, Newton's laws, and basic optics.
Medical terminology is a language unto itself. Both exams include questions on prefixes (brady-, tachy-, hypo-, hyper-), suffixes (-itis, -ectomy, -plasty, -ology), and root words (cardio, pulmon, hepat, nephro). Knowing how to decode an unfamiliar term by its components is more reliable than memorizing every word individually.
Although both exams serve a similar gatekeeping role, they are distinct products from different companies, and nursing schools typically require one or the other — rarely both. The HESI A2 is published by Elsevier and is modular: schools select which sections they require, so a student applying to one program might only need to take Math, Reading, Vocabulary, Grammar, and A&P, while another program adds Biology and Chemistry. The ATI TEAS 7 is published by Assessment Technologies Institute and has a fixed four-section structure that every candidate sits.
Score scales differ too. HESI A2 section scores are reported as percentages (0–100%). ATI TEAS scores are reported as a composite percentage alongside four category scores and an adjusted individual total score (AITS). Familiarize yourself with the specific score requirements of every program on your application list before you decide which study resources to prioritize.
Printing the PDF and working through it by hand mirrors the focus required during the actual exam. Set a timer for each section to build pacing awareness — running out of time on the math section is one of the most common reasons otherwise well-prepared candidates underperform. After completing a section, score it before moving on, and write a brief note next to every question you missed explaining what you got wrong: careless arithmetic, unfamiliar vocabulary, or a concept gap. That annotation habit turns your printed PDF into a personalized study guide you can return to in the final days before your exam.
Combine the PDF with online practice on this site for the most complete preparation. Our interactive quizzes give you immediate feedback and track your progress over time, while the printed test trains the focused, distraction-free stamina you'll need in the testing room.