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Nursing exam is one of the strategies to assess competency and quality of graduated nursing students. Only those who passed the Nursing Exam can be registered as a nurse to ensure that the patients will receive nursing care from the competent nurses. Preparing for the National Nursing Exam is a challenging process both for education institutions and students. It requires creative strategies to ensure that students are familiar with the examination system and questions. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the effect of progress test, a program tailored to familiarize students with the National Exam test system and questions, on the students performance in the Nursing Exam Try Out. This study is preexperimental study with one group pre and posttest design. Of the total 143 eligible internship nursing students, 139 participated in the pretest and 128 finished the post test. Duration of the study was 2 months. During the study, the students were practicing online through the progress test program in their homebased hospital in 6 different hospitals in Yogyakarta and Central Java. The students finished 2 different examination packages of the Try Out for their pretest and posttest through E Learning system. The 180 multiple choice questions for progress test were developed based on the National Nursing Exam Blue Print and have been reviewed by internal reviewers. The result of the study showed that there was a statistically significant increase of exam score from M 43.75, SD 9.59 to M 48.49, SD 7.83 (p 0.000). With passing grade of 47, only 57.6 percent students passed the exam in the pretest while 62.5 percent passed the exam in posttest. The progress test can be used as an effective strategy to prepare National Nursing Exam as well as the possibility to pass the exam.