ABO-NCLE Pass Rate, Format & Study Guide

ABO-NCLE's own Basic Exam Handbook (February 2025 edition) publishes 2024 calendar-year pass rates of 64.0% for the ABO Basic Exam (NOCE) and 59.0% for the NCLE Basic Exam (CLRE) — independently corroborated via a second search cross-check.

If you don't pass, ABO-NCLE requires a 14-day wait before retesting and allows up to three total attempts; after a third unsuccessful attempt, the wait extends to 90 days before you're eligible again. Each retake requires re-registering and paying the full exam fee again ($225 for the basic NOCE or CLRE exam) — ABO-NCLE's fees are explicitly non-refundable, and there is no discounted retake rate.

ABO-NCLE sets the passing score using the Modified Angoff Method, a standard-setting process where subject-matter-expert panels judge the difficulty of each item rather than fixing pass/fail at a flat percentage like 70%. Of the 125 questions on the basic exam, only 100 are scored (the rest are unscored pretest items), and ABO-NCLE does not publish the resulting numeric cut score.

With 125 questions (100 scored) in a 2-hour window split across dispensing, refraction, and — for NCLE — contact lens fitting and patient care, breadth trips people up more than pacing does. Since ABO-NCLE's own 2024 pass rates sit well under two-thirds (64% ABO / 59% NCLE), treat the exam as genuinely hard rather than a formality: work practical dispensing and lens-fitting scenarios, not just definitions, since both bodies test applied judgment as much as vocabulary.