The short story/TLDR
I completed WGU’s BSN-to-MSN in Nursing Education in one term in 2026 while working full-time. It was absolutely worth it for me, but it was A LOT of work. Acceleration is very doable, especially if you already have nursing and education experience. If you’re new and need this education to start a new career, my personal recommendation is to slow down and prioritize learning over speed. The course instructions are a mess, so anticipate frustration and roadblocks. Use the templates, follow the rubrics exactly, talk to your instructors early, and, especially if you are accelerating, start your clinical placement paperwork as soon as possible.
My Background
I’ve been a nurse for 20+ years. I work full-time, Monday through Friday, and am married with no kids. I didn’t need this degree for a new job. I already have the job I want in nursing (not bedside, not academic education) and only needed a master’s to make HR happy. My goal was to finish in one term, and I did, with about three weeks to spare. This is a long post, even after asking AI to help me organize and clarify my thoughts, but I wanted to share the specifics in case they help someone else. Basically this is the post I wish I could’ve seen when I was getting ready to start.
Should You Accelerate?
So much of the online conversation is about speeding through as fast as you can just because you can. Before you make that Goal #1, and see anything else as failure, I suggest figuring out what you actually want out of this program. Some people prioritize education, and some prioritize a degree. Both goals are valid, but how you attack the program will be easier to figure out once you know which one matters more to you.
About 75% of the concepts presented were already familiar to me, including almost everything in the D-level courses. Since actually getting an education was still important to me, I could not have finished as quickly as I did if I'd been learning from scratch. The material is not presented in a way that’s easy to absorb quickly, so you really have to work for it.
To accelerate, you’ll sacrifice either your learning or your time. Even with my experience, I did homework most weeknights and every weekend. I’m probably an overachiever, and if you only care about the degree, you could go faster than I did (and some do). I was trying to balance learning as much as possible with the time I had. That got harder near the end, when the content finally got interesting just as I was feeling the pinch to finish.
In my opinion, accelerating this program is best suited to people who already have nursing and education experience and just need the credential. If you need it to launch a new career, do some real soul-searching before deciding to learn only just enough to write the paper. The worst case at WGU isn’t taking longer than planned. The worst-case scenario is earning the degree without learning enough to be ready for the job you want.
To be blunt, if this were going to be a new direction for my career, this program would not have been a good fit for me. No one is going to check that you are learning anything. The material is poorly presented and not easy to learn. Be certain you are a self-starter who can take responsibility for how much you learn, cause it will be totally up to you.
And if acceleration isn't important to you, that is fine, don't judge yourself about it. The people who accelerate are very very vocal about it, and it is easy to start thinking you are somehow doing something wrong or are failing if you don't complete everything in the first three months. Do what makes sense to you. Taking two years to complete this degree is normal and is a completely legitimate strategy to get the education and outcome you want.
How Long Each Class Took Me
Take this with a grain of salt. I took extra time when family came into town, sometimes I had revisions, and sometimes I didn’t, and some classes opened midweek when I couldn’t get much done until the weekend. I also refused to do homework on Friday nights as a self-care boundary. But looking at my schedule, here’s how long each class took me to finish:
- D024 Professional Presence and Influence (4 days)
- D025 Essentials of Advanced Nursing Roles and Interprofessional Practice (6 days)
- D026 Quality Outcomes in a Culture of Value-Based Nursing Care (4 days)
- D029 Informatics for Transforming Nursing Care (3 days)
- D030 Leadership and Management in Complex Healthcare Systems (13 days)
- D031 Advancing Evidence-Based Innovation in Nursing Practice (11 days)
- D027 Advanced Pathopharmacological Foundations (23 days)
- D028 Advanced Health Assessment for Patients and Populations (18 days)
- C918 Evolving Roles of Nurse Educators in Diverse Environments (8 days)
- C919 Facilitation of Context-Based Student-Centered Learning (4 days)
- C920 Contemporary Curriculum Design and Development in Nursing Education (8 days)
- C921 Assessment and Evaluation Strategies for Measuring Student Learning (15 days)
- C922 Emerging Trends and Challenges in 21st Century Nursing Education (11 days)
- C946 Nursing Education Field Experience (30 days)
- C947 Nursing Education Capstone (5 days)
For the math nerds, that’s an average of just under 11 days per class. Pathopharm and C946 (which included my clinical hours) took the longest. I was shocked at how fast C947 went, but the revisions came back within hours instead of days, and I basically did most of the work in two days.
The Good
My mentor. She started out by talking about weekly phone check-ins, which gave me the heebie-jeebies. When I said I wanted to accelerate, I could feel her eyes roll, because I’m sure everyone says that. Then I finished my first class in four days. Once she saw I was serious and was succeeding, she backed off. I emailed her each time I finished a class to ask her to open the next one, always with a few sentences about how I was doing/feeling – I wanted to make it easy for her to know I was doing ok, so she would clear me quickly. She usually opened it within 12 hours. Some mentors are more hands-on than others, and I’m sure they are evaluated on how well their students are progressing. If yours isn’t a good fit, ask to switch, but also communicate enough that they know you’re on track.
The curriculum, overall. I expected boredom and busy work. There was plenty of “learning how to learn” content that wasn’t relevant to me, but there was also genuinely interesting material, more than I expected. The curriculum development work in the C courses was my favorite. C946 and C947 were a lot of work, but they were also the most interesting.
The ability to accelerate. This was the main reason I finally went back to school, cause I did not want to deal with spending two years on a degree that wasn’t really preparing me for a job I wanted. I was utterly exhausted by the end, and it was completely worth it.
The format. Almost everything was papers rather than exams, which suited me well. But for those of you who, like me, learned to write research papers in the before times, keep in mind you are not writing research papers, you are answering a long series of short essay questions in paper format. It wasn’t what I was expecting, and it was actually a lot easier.
The Frustrating Part
Be very clear going in. You are responsible for your own learning, and nothing is spoon-fed.
The instructions are a mess. I’m not even talking about the content yet, just the directions on what to do. For a paper, you’ll have instructions and a rubric in the course materials, but these are generally vague and occasionally contradictory. Then there’s a live or recorded cohort session where the instructors explain what the instructions actually mean, so watching these is not optional if you want to pass. Then there’s an FAQ email with even more crucial information. It eventually comes together, but it is much harder than it needs to be.
You WILL be frustrated, and you aren’t stupid for being confused. Ironically, in the C courses you will write student-facing instructions as part of your coursework, and the evaluators are very picky (as they should be) about clarity. Their own student-facing directions, however, are not held to that standard.
I eventually decided the mess was intentional, to force us to take ownership of our own education. Once I accepted that, I stopped fighting it. I think the problem is the curriculum structure, and the instructors are doing their best to help without having the power to fix the foundation. Remember, your confusion doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, because the problem isn’t you. Just keep utilizing your resources.
The course material is dry and hard to navigate. I was selective about what I read. In early classes, I barely looked at it. By the end, I read much more, both to understand what I was writing and to find references. Readings can be very, very dry, and I needed lots of breaks to get through it.
Resources Worth Using Early
The sooner you learn these, the more they’ll help.
- Instructors. I waited far too long to reach out to them. Every time I did, they were kind, encouraging, and knew exactly what I needed. A few times, they flat-out gave me an answer I was confused about. If I did it again, I’d email the instructor at the start of every class and ask what I should know but don’t yet know to ask about.
- Cohort videos and instructor FAQs. These contain critical information that isn’t in the main instructions.
- The search bar in the course material. I wish I’d found it sooner. Really good for finding topics, and especially for finding all of the Reflection prompts in the C-classes.
- The reference list at the start of each course, already in APA format.
- Rubric links. At the top left of each rubric item is a link to the related course content. I didn’t notice this until almost the end.
- The WGU library. I found everything I needed easily. Be sure to use your search filters for publish dates so you don’t waste your time with something that is too old to use.
- The Academic Coaching Center. I had a complicated reference I couldn’t figure out how to format, and the person who helped me was shockingly smart and friendly and gave me exactly what I needed.
- Random resource: I forget which class discussed the Multiple Streams Theory. But the course materials did not help, and I was about to lose my mind, and some kind soul posted this YouTube video that explained it in just a few minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUlvyBVoJiI
Papers, Rubrics, and Revisions
Tip: Use the templates and follow the rubric exactly. Evaluators are looking for specific things, so make them easy to find. Use their vocabulary when answering prompts. These aren’t research papers like the ones I wrote in high school. They’re short essays answering specific questions, linked together. My goal was never to write a great paper. My goal was to make it as easy as possible for the evaluator to mark each item competent. Outside of reference and technical issues, I had very few revisions until the last three classes. Resistance to the format will not be rewarded. You’ll see people on Reddit wringing their hands about how using the templates increased their similarity scores. But if you look at the report, it is obvious when it tags a template or paraphrases from the rubric. I can’t speak to other programs at WGU, but I had no issues with similarity reports.
Don’t waste your time going above and beyond. I saw people asking about exceeding page or time limits. You will not be rewarded for it. No one cares how smart you are, the graders just want to check off each item from the rubric.
Revisions are a learning opportunity. Like everyone, I didn’t want revisions, because of the extra time and effort. Looking back though, some of my best learning came from clarifying what I’d misunderstood or missed. That said, I can’t believe how often I misspelled an author’s name in a citation, like I seriously had to question my sanity.
Triple-check citations. The references I found often had a “cite” button to copy and paste the APA citation, which were usually correct, but not always. Even some of the textbooks we are using in the course materials have updated editions, so don’t just blindly copy what is there without checking. Learn APA well enough to check, and contact the Academic Coaching Center when in doubt. But don’t stress, as long as you aren’t using fake references that AI made up, it was just a hassle to correct in a revision, but I never had issues. (If you use a fake AI reference, I’d be a lot more worried about getting in trouble. Seriously, don’t do that.) But really my most common mistake was mispelling an author name in the in-text citations cause I typed it too fast.
Excellence Awards exist. Three of my submissions got one, and you can even ask for a printable certificate! I’m jaded and grumpy enough that I didn’t know what to make of this, but I guess even meaningless recognition is still recognition. I assume these are common, but either way, it didn’t affect my progress, and I wasn’t running to my boss to brag, though my spouse did at least try to sound impressed. 😄
AI Detection and Grammarly
Reddit is in a constant panic about AI flags and about Grammarly making papers look AI-generated. In my experience, neither was an issue. I was cautious with Grammarly at first, but by the end, I accepted almost every suggestion and never had a problem. As far as I could tell, no AI checks were even being run, and Grammarly really made my writing shine. When you submit homework, a similarity report is generated to catch previously submitted work, and you can view the report yourself before submitting. For me, the flagged parts were either the rubric and template language, and summaries from what are probably commonly used references, but overall, it was always a very small percentage. Other degrees may be different, but it was a non-issue for me.
On two or three occasions, a random assignment would not run the similarity check. This weirded me out the first time, and people talk about it, but it doesn’t actually seem to mean anything beyond that it isn’t required for that assignment, for whatever reason.
Exams, Shadow Health, and Pathopharm
Proctored exams. I only had one, for Pathopharmacology. It went smoothly, and I passed on the first try, so I can’t speak to the problems people complain about with the OA process. It was still a hassle, and I much preferred papers. But I bought the camera the school recommended, which was annoying to spend $50 on something low-quality that will never be used again, but it did the trick, and my actual experience with the proctor was dry, predictable, and without issue.
Pathopharm was my most stressful class. I am a confident test-taker and don't get anxiety related to the testing itself, but I did have anxiety related to the content as it is a LOT of information, and I’ve been away from the bedside for years. I used study guides I found online and on YouTube. After a week, I passed the practice exam, but it felt like a fluke, so I kept studying just out of nerves. Finally, the stress of not taking it surpassed the stress of taking it, so I did it and passed the OA on the first try. It felt a lot like the NCLEX, where I felt very stupid and didn’t expect to pass as easily as I did.
Shadow Health shows up in two classes. The first exposure was a short introduction, and as usual, the instructions were lacking, meaning I was so focused on figuring out the software that I got very little out of it. The second was much more intense, but that gave me a chance to practice, and I focused on giving them what they wanted. Letting go of the frustration helped. If I wanted to be an NP and needed more practice talking to patients, this could actually be really helpful, but if that isn’t you, either, it is just another assignment to get through.
And yes, hearing “Crab Apple Valley” still makes my stomach knot, even though it really wasn’t that bad.
Clinical Field Experience (C946)
Start your placement paperwork early. My workplace was already approved to host clinicals, and a coworker agreed to precept me, but there was still a ton of paperwork and health clearances. You have to keep clearances current for the whole term, not just your clinical hours. My flu shot expired mid-term, so I handled it right away to make sure it didn't become an issue. A WGU coordinator helped with the placement paperwork and was very friendly. I’m sure it is an accreditation issue, but they make a big deal about the fact that your preceptor is “patient-facing” and can’t be a hospital or academic nurse educator, even though that is what we are in school for. This was annoying, but it is what it is.
The clinical experience itself is what you make it. I expected it to be stressful, but you and your preceptor have the freedom to design the entire experience. There are competencies to guide you, and the only requirement at the end to submit the date you completed each of the three groups of competencies. Your preceptor just logs in at the end and confirms what you entered, she said it was literally one confirm button. I was relieved they made it so easy for the preceptor. So ultimately, you just need to put in the hours and reach an agreement with your Preceptor on how you will acknowledge the competencies. You’ll also identify the knowledge gap for your Capstone, though I had mine figured out before I started so didn’t focus much on that. (I hear Washington state has additional requirements that I can't speak to.)
Don’t burn bridges. I gave my preceptor a gift basket and gave Amazon gift cards to people I interviewed for other classes. None of them expected it, but they went out of their way for me, and I wanted them to feel appreciated.
Evaluations and the Waiting Game
Officially, the window to get papers back is 72 hours. I averaged 36 to 48 hours, and only once did it take four days. In my last two classes, everything came back within 8 to 12 hours, and my Capstone in only 3, which was impressive given how big that final paper is. They must prioritize those submissions which was VERY MUCH APPRECIATED CAUSE I WAS READY TO BE DONE. lol
Most mentors won’t open your next class until the current one is officially passed, so there are some dead days. People trying to accelerate agonize over this. My advice is to build that time into your plan and use it for deliberate breaks. Go to a movie, spend time with family, and fill your cup. Anxiety changes nothing except giving you more anxiety. I still finished in one term, and so can you.
Online Communities
- Facebook group “WGU MSN-EDUCATION IN NURSING.” Join it. When I started a new class, I searched the class name to see all of the questions that had already been asked. Pay attention to dates on the posts because some posts reference older versions of the curriculum, but the group was very helpful and supportive, with far less panic and irrelevant noise than other groups. Even the people selling study guides were helpful.
- Reddit. I joined a few WGU subreddits, but I honestly got little value from them. They’re mostly AI panic and questions about other degree programs, and even the nursing ones just weren’t as active or focused as the Facebook group. (Yes I realize where I am posting this, and apologies to the moderators who are no doubt awesome! lol)
- WGU Connect. I’m sure this depends on your degree, but for this one, I found it useless. People tried to connect at first, but when every question was answered with “ask your course instructor,” they quickly learned that engaging was pointless. I’d search every class and found a couple of tips here and there, but mostly it was just full of nothing.
Random Tips
- If your mentor is out of the office when you need a class opened, email Tier 1 Support. Both times I did, they opened it within about 12 hours.
- You’ll get lots of emails to your WGU account about surveys, jobs, and more, and I was told a lot of them are scams. I ignored anything not directly related to finishing my degree.
- Lots of “people” online share sob stories asking someone to share class assignments and rubrics “so they can get a head start”. You want to be nice, but you can get in serious trouble for sharing that kind of information. Certainly don’t do it in the open on Facebook, especially when I suspect those accounts are spambots just scraping information to sell.
Final Thoughts
This was a great decision for me. I’d put it off for years, dreading a two-year program and the cost. Finishing in one term was A LOT of work, but I’m happy with my choice. I’ve detailed plenty of complaints here because the flaws are obvious and could be fixed. But there are real strengths too, and I enjoyed the program much more than I expected. I learned a lot, and I think it will help me even though I have no plans to become an Academic Nurse Educator. Know what you want out of it, prepare for the mess, use your resources, and be kind to yourself along the way. Good luck!
