Level Up RN Review: Which Prep Gap Does It Actually Fix?

recall. Here's which layer of your prep stack it fills, and who should skip it.

Level Up RN centers on flashcards, concise study guides, and video review for nursing school and the NCLEX. It's a retrieval tool: it confirms you can recall what you already understand. That makes it a layer in a prep stack rather than a whole one — lectures build understanding, a question bank trains application, flashcards check recall. Buy it for the gap you actually have.

Disclosure: Testavia sells NCLEX prep and therefore competes with Level Up RN. We're telling you that up front because a competitor review that hides the conflict isn't one worth trusting. We'll still tell you plainly where Level Up RN is the right buy, and where your money would be better spent elsewhere.

What Is Level Up RN?

Level Up RN is a nursing study brand built by Cathy Parkes, BSN, RN, CWCN, PHN, centered primarily on flashcards: physical card decks organized by subject (pharmacology, medical-surgical nursing, pediatrics, maternity, and others) and a digital flashcard product called Flashables that pairs cards with short instructional videos and quiz-style feedback. Beyond the flashcards themselves, the brand offers a subscription Membership that adds a larger library of study videos, condensed "cram courses," and review questions, along with study planners, organizational tools, and review games. The stated audience spans nursing school coursework and the ATI, HESI, and NCLEX exams, rather than being built around NCLEX preparation alone.

It's worth being precise about what this product actually is, since that framing determines everything else in this review. Level Up RN's own marketing describes itself as flashcards and condensed study content first, and its own NCLEX resource page directs readers toward outside practice question resources including UWorld and NCSBN's own preparation page for additional practice testing. That's a meaningful signal: the product's own creator isn't positioning it as a full practice question bank, and readers looking for that specific format are pointed elsewhere by Level Up RN itself.

What's Actually in the Box

The physical and digital flashcard sets are organized by subject rather than by exam, which fits the product's dual audience of nursing students working through individual courses and NCLEX candidates doing broader review. The Membership tier adds video content and "cram course" material intended for faster review passes, along with quiz questions that check whether a concept has stuck useful for confirming recall, though a more limited assessment tool than a large, adaptive bank of exam-style items built specifically to simulate test day reasoning. Pricing for individual flashcard sets, digital bundles, and the Membership subscription varies and changes over time; Level Up RN publishes current figures on its own site, and quoting a specific number here would likely be stale by the time you read it.

The Format, in More Detail

It's worth walking through the format a bit further, since "flashcards" undersells what the product actually looks like in practice. The physical card sets are organized by subject — pharmacology, medical-surgical nursing, pediatric nursing, maternity, fundamentals, and several others — with each card typically presenting a concept on one side and a concise explanation on the other, often built around mnemonics or simplified visual cues to aid memory. The digital version, called Flashables, layers short instructional videos onto that same card-based structure, along with a progress-tracking dashboard that shows which cards you've mastered and which still need review — a feature that matters more than it might sound, since visible progress is one of the more reliable ways spaced repetition tools keep people actually using them rather than abandoning them a few weeks in.

The Membership subscription is the more expansive tier, bundling in a larger library of instructional videos organized by subject, condensed "cram course" versions of that same content for faster review passes closer to an exam date, and review questions with feedback that let you check comprehension as you go. It's worth being precise that this quiz and feedback layer, while genuinely useful for confirming recall, isn't equivalent in scale or design to a dedicated question bank built specifically to simulate full-length, exam-format practice tests — a distinction that matters for how you should think about what this product can and can't replace in your overall prep.

The Three Layers of a Prep Stack

Here's the framing that actually matters for deciding whether this product is right for you, and it's the same lens worth applying to any nursing exam prep purchase, not just this one.

Understanding, Application, and Retrieval

Most nursing exam preparation, whether for coursework, ATI, HESI, or the NCLEX, breaks down into three genuinely different problems, and each one calls for a different kind of tool.

The first problem is understanding: you simply don't yet grasp a concept well enough to explain it back. Maybe the pathophysiology behind a disease process hasn't clicked, or you can't yet explain why a particular medication works the way it does. That gap calls for a content course — structured teaching, delivered through lectures or detailed written explanations, built to walk you through a concept from the ground up. Our Testavia Nursing School Prep course provides the exact visual cheat sheets and core study guides needed to master these complex lectures before you ever face a test.

The second problem is application: you understand a concept well enough in isolation, but you struggle to apply it under exam style conditions — reading a scenario, sorting relevant from irrelevant information, and selecting the right response among plausible sounding distractors. That gap calls for a genuine question bank, built around large volumes of exam-style items with detailed rationales that train you specifically in that kind of reasoning under test conditions.

The third problem is retrieval: you understood the concept at some point, and you could probably apply it if reminded but it faded from memory by the time you actually need it, whether that's a unit exam three weeks later or the NCLEX itself months after your last relevant course. That's the specific gap flashcards and condensed reviews are built to close. They're not designed to teach you something for the first time, and they're not designed to train exam style reasoning under pressure. They're designed to test whether something you already learned is still accessible to you, and to strengthen that recall through repetition over time.

Where Level Up RN Actually Fits

Level Up RN sits squarely in that third category. It's a retrieval tool, and a well regarded one — flashcard based spaced review is a genuinely effective, widely supported learning technique, and there's nothing wrong with the format itself. The issue isn't quality; it's fit. Buying a strong retrieval tool to solve an understanding problem, or an application problem, is a common and expensive mistake, because a flashcard can confirm you know that a particular lab value is abnormal — it can't teach you why that value matters clinically, and it can't train you to reason through a multi-step patient scenario where that value is one clue among several.

This is also precisely why this review isn't structured as "Level Up RN versus UWorld" or "Level Up RN versus SimpleNursing." Those aren't competing products solving the same problem — they're different tools built for different gaps, and a candidate with the budget for it often benefits from using more than one simultaneously, each for the job it's actually built for. The table below is meant to be useful even to someone who hasn't bought any of these three products yet, since the real first question isn't which brand to pick, but which layer of the problem you're actually facing.

If you can't yet explain a concept in your own words, flashcards will simply test you, repeatedly, on something you never actually learned in the first place — which is frustrating and inefficient, not because the flashcards are bad, but because they're the wrong tool for that particular gap.

Can Flashcards Handle NGN?

Partly. Retrieval still matters under the Next Generation NCLEX, because you cannot reason through a case study using facts you do not reliably hold. What flashcards do not train is the case-based, partial-credit reasoning the newer item types are specifically built to measure. So the honest answer is that a retrieval tool remains necessary for NGN without being sufficient for it — and that is a distinction most reviews of retrieval-based products skip entirely.

What NGN Actually Changed

The Next Generation NCLEX, which launched in April 2023, introduced new case based item types including scenario driven "case studies" specifically designed to assess a candidate's ability to recognize cues, analyze data, and prioritize interventions across a multi-step clinical picture, rather than simply recalling an isolated fact. According to Level Up RN's own published explanation of the exam, these new case based item types make up roughly a quarter of the exam, with the remaining three quarters still consisting of more familiar formats like multiple choice and select all that apply questions built on the same underlying content categories the exam has always tested.

That's an important nuance, and it cuts in both directions. Retrieval tools like flashcards are, by their nature, built around discrete facts and concepts rather than multi-step clinical reasoning — so it's a fair question whether a flashcard-based product meaningfully prepares you for the case-based portion of the exam specifically. At the same time, it would be inaccurate to conclude that retrieval tools are now irrelevant to NCLEX prep, since the majority of the exam's content, and the foundational knowledge underlying even the new case-based items, is still the same base information the exam has always tested. You genuinely cannot reason through a case study about a patient's declining respiratory status if you don't already have a reliable recall of what abnormal respiratory findings look like in the first place — the facts are a prerequisite for the reasoning, even though having the facts doesn't by itself produce the reasoning.

The Honest Answer

Recall is necessary and insufficient for the modern NCLEX. It's necessary because case-based reasoning depends on a foundation of retrievable facts you can bring to bear on a scenario; it's insufficient because having those facts available doesn't automatically train you in the specific skill of sorting relevant information from irrelevant information under a case's specific conditions and using partial credit scoring formats correctly. Level Up RN's own materials don't make a strong claim to specifically train the case-based, partial-credit item types that NGN introduced — its own resource pages, if anything, point candidates toward dedicated question banks for that kind of practice testing. That's a reasonably honest positioning on the vendor's part, and it lines up with how this review is framing the product: strong for the retrieval layer, not built as a substitute for case based application practice.

If you want to understand how those newer scoring formats specifically work including select all that apply scoring under NGN and the structure of bow tie case items — our guide to NGN scoring covers that directly rather than repeating it here.

Who It's Right For and Who Should Skip It

Level Up RN is the right buy if your gap is recall: you understand the concepts but cannot retrieve them quickly or reliably under time pressure. It is the wrong buy if you cannot yet explain a concept in your own words, in which case you need instruction first, or if you understand the material but keep missing practice questions, in which case you need a question bank. Both halves of that matter, and the second half is what makes the first credible rather than a sales pitch.

Good Fit

Level Up RN tends to be a strong fit if you already understand the material reasonably well but find it doesn't stick — you can explain a concept the day you learn it, then blank on it a month later. It's also a good fit if you want condensed review spread across a full semester or academic year rather than a short, intense pre-exam cram, since its content spans individual nursing school courses as well as licensing-exam review. If you're a nursing student specifically, rather than only an NCLEX candidate, the fact that its material covers coursework as well as the licensing exam changes the value proposition of a longer term subscription, since you'd plausibly be using it across multiple semesters rather than a single two-month prep window. And if you're someone who genuinely engages with spaced repetition — someone who will actually pull out the cards regularly rather than buying them with good intentions — the format tends to deliver real value.

It's also a reasonable fit for candidates who learn well from short, structured video explanations paired with a physical or digital card to return to later — some people retain concepts more easily when the same idea is reinforced across two different formats rather than one, and the combination of a short video plus a condensed card is exactly that kind of layered reinforcement.

Poor Fit

On the other hand, if your foundation in a subject is genuinely shaky — if you can't yet explain the underlying concept in your own words — a content course is the more appropriate first purchase, since flashcards will mostly frustrate you by testing recall of material you never solidly learned. If you understand concepts well but consistently miss practice questions or struggle with exam-style scenario reasoning, a genuine question bank is the better investment for that specific gap. If what you're specifically after is targeted practice with the new case-based, NGN-style item formats, a dedicated question bank built around that format is a more direct match than a flashcard product.

And here's the plainest, most common honest reason to skip a retrieval product regardless of how good it is: if you've bought flashcards before from any brand and they're still sitting shrink wrapped, unopened, months later, that's genuinely useful information about your own study habits, and it's not a reflection on the product's quality. A retrieval tool only creates value if you actually use it regularly; buying a second one because the first one didn't work rarely solves the underlying issue.

None of this is meant as criticism of Level Up RN specifically. Retrieval practice is a well regarded, evidence backed learning technique, and flashcards are genuinely good at the job they're designed to do. The point throughout this review has been fit rather than quality — matching the tool to the actual gap you have, rather than assuming any one product, however well-designed, can substitute for the other two layers of preparation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Level Up RN?

A study resource built around flashcards, condensed study guides, and video review for nursing school and the NCLEX. Its core job is retrieval — helping you recall material you've already learned rather than teaching concepts from scratch or drilling exam-style application under case-based conditions.

Is Level Up RN enough on its own?

Only if recall is your actual gap. If you can't yet explain a concept in your own words, you need content instruction first; if you understand concepts but keep missing practice questions, you need a genuine question bank. Flashcards confirm you know something — they don't teach it from scratch, and they don't specifically train applying it under exam conditions.

Level Up RN or UWorld?

That is the wrong question, because they are different tools for different problems — our UWorld NCLEX review covers that product on the same terms. UWorld is a question bank built to train application and exam-style reasoning; Level Up RN is a retrieval tool built to check and reinforce recall. Candidates who can afford both often use both, for genuinely different purposes. If you can only buy one, buy for the specific gap you actually have right now.

Do flashcards work for the Next Generation NCLEX?

It's a fair question worth asking directly rather than assuming an answer. The Next Generation NCLEX leans on case-based clinical judgment for a meaningful share of the exam, and you can't reason through a case study on facts you do not reliably have, so retrieval of foundational knowledge still genuinely matters. Whether flashcards alone adequately prepare you for the case-based, partial-credit item types specifically is a separate and narrower question, and it's one Level Up RN's own materials don't claim to fully answer either.

How much does Level Up RN cost?

Check Level Up RN's current pricing directly — individual flashcard sets, bundles, and the Membership subscriptions are priced separately and change over time, so a specific figure quoted in any review, including this one, would likely be out of date. Their pricing is entirely separate from the NCLEX registration fee itself, which is paid separately — see NCSBN's NCLEX registration information for the current fee.

Is Level Up RN good for nursing school or just the NCLEX?

Its material genuinely spans both, which is part of the appeal if you'd hold onto it across a full semester or program rather than buying it only for a short pre exam cram. Whether that's the more economical choice for you depends on how long you'd realistically keep using it — check the current product lineup to judge that for your own situation.

Are flashcards actually effective?

Retrieval practice is a well-regarded, evidence-supported learning technique, so the format itself isn't in question. The real issue is whether recall is actually the thing standing between you and passing your exam. If your gap is understanding a concept or applying it under exam conditions, an excellent flashcard product still won't move the needle on either of those, however well it's built.

The Bottom Line

Level Up RN is a genuinely well-built retrieval tool — flashcards, condensed review, and short video reinforcement aimed at helping recall stick, spanning both nursing school coursework and NCLEX review. It's the third layer of a three-layer prep stack, not a replacement for the other two: a content course builds understanding, a question bank trains application under exam conditions, and flashcards confirm that what you've already learned is still accessible when you need it. Buying it to fix a gap it wasn't built to fix — a shaky foundational concept, or weak exam-style reasoning — is the common, expensive mistake. Buying it because your actual gap is recall is a genuinely sound decision, from us or from anyone.