Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria introduced revised nursing curriculum emphasising competency-based education, Information Communication Technology integration and increased clinical hours. This retrospective comparative study examined professional examination performance of nursing students trained under the old curriculum (2018–2021) and revised curriculum (2022–2025) at the University of Port Harcourt and Bayelsa State College of Nursing Sciences. Sample size was 1,077 complete student records (97.6% of 1,104 eligible records) from 16 graduating cohorts (7 old-curriculum, 9 revised-curriculum). Academic performance was operationalised as professional qualifying examination pass/fail status. Data was analysed using descriptive statistics for student-level overall pass rates and unweighted mean cohort pass rates and inferential analyses at the cohort level (n = 16). Odds of passing were calculated at individual-student level. Findings showed that old curriculum recorded student-weighted overall pass rate of 89.08% (unweighted mean cohort pass rate = 82.07%, SD ≈ 22.8); revised curriculum recorded 93.42% (mean cohort pass rate ≈ 90.3%, SD ≈ 10.2). Mean cohort pass rates rose from approximately 70% under the old curriculum to approximately 88% under the revised curriculum (UNIPORT); BYSCONM maintained high performance (approximately 91% to 93%). Odds of passing with revised curriculum were higher than the old curriculum (approximately 1.7 times). Conclusively, students who trained under revised curriculum showed descriptively higher aggregate and cohort-level pass rates which indicate a favourable descriptive pattern with the revised curriculum. Multi-institutional studies using individual-level data and controlling for student are recommended.

Keywords: Nursing curriculum, academic performance, nursing students, old curriculum, and revised curriculum.