Illinois CNA State Practice Exam

Pass the written portion of Illinois's CNA competency exam and you're only halfway there. The Illinois Department of Public Health requires a hands-on skills demonstration too, five skills, randomly selected from everything you covered in your 120-hour training program (80 classroom, 40 clinical), and you won't know which five until you're standing in front of the examiner.

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale administers both halves. You need 75% or better, and you get three total attempts, fail all three and Illinois requires you to repeat an entire approved training program before testing again, not just pay a retest fee and try a fourth time.

The written exam draws from six duty areas:

• Communicating Information
• Basic Nursing Skills
• Personal Care Skills
• Basic Restorative Skills
• Mental Health and Social Service Needs
• Residents' Rights

Because the skills you'll demonstrate are randomly assigned rather than predictable, the safer prep strategy is reviewing everything you trained on rather than betting on a subset. Strong written knowledge doesn't automatically translate into flawless technique on whichever five skills you draw, and the reverse is true too.

One prerequisite worth knowing early: a Livescan fingerprint background check has to clear before you're even permitted to attend clinical training, so this isn't something to leave until the week before your exam date.

Our practice questions cover all six official duty areas, with explanations built to reinforce the reasoning behind each answer, not just the correct choice, since that reasoning is what carries over into the skills demonstration too.

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