The CGFNS Nursing Education Form is the document your nursing school fills out to report your coursework and clinical hours directly to CGFNS International for credential evaluation. You complete only a short applicant section at the top — name, CGFNS ID, contact details, signature, and date — then hand the form to your school’s registrar. The registrar fills in the program details, signs, applies the institution’s seal over the signature, and mails the form to CGFNS in a sealed, stamped envelope. Once the school takes the form back, you never touch it again. That single rule is what separates approved applications from rejected ones.
Before You Open the Form
The form itself is short. The preparation isn’t. Gather these before you print anything, because a mismatch between what you write and what your school’s records say is one of the most common reasons applications get flagged.
- The full legal name and physical address of every nursing school you attended.
- Your exact dates of attendance, by month and year, for each program.
- Your CGFNS identification number from your online account.
- Your current, unrestricted nursing license or registration information. The licensing authority will need to send verification directly to CGFNS.1CGFNS International, Inc. CGFNS Certification Program
Small discrepancies cause outsized problems. A slightly different school name, an enrollment date off by one month, a middle initial on one document and not another — any of these can trigger a deficiency notice and stall you for weeks. Match your entries to your school’s official records exactly.
You access the form through your TruMerit account. The old CGFNS Connect system now redirects to start.TruMerit.org, so an outdated bookmark will still find you.2CGFNS Connect. CGFNS Connect Login Once your application is active and your fee is paid, you can download and print the Nursing Education Form.
Filling Out the Applicant Section
Your part of the form is the top portion only. You enter identifying information so the school can match the form to your academic record: your name, CGFNS identification number, and contact details. You then sign and date the form. That signature is a privacy waiver. It authorizes your school to release grades, clinical hours, and program completion status to CGFNS.
Stop at your signature line. Everything below belongs to the school. If you fill in any of the institutional fields — the hour breakdowns, the program dates, the language of instruction — CGFNS will reject the form and you will need to start over with a fresh copy. That means requesting a new form, paying any associated fees again, and going back to your registrar.
What Your School Completes
The school’s section is the substance of the form. A registrar or other authorized official reports a detailed hour breakdown across core nursing subjects: adult medical-surgical nursing, maternal-infant care, pediatric nursing, psychiatric and mental health nursing, and community health nursing, among others. Evaluators use those numbers to compare your curriculum against U.S. entry-level nursing education standards.
Two authenticity requirements matter above all others. The school official must sign the form, and the institutional seal or stamp must cover that signature.3CGFNS International. CGFNS Nursing Education Form A seal placed elsewhere on the page, or a signature without a seal over it, fails the check. The school also confirms the language of instruction and whether you completed the program under the national curriculum in effect during your enrollment.
Schools sometimes find the hour categories don’t match how their curriculum was structured. If your program bundled pediatric content into a general nursing course, or split maternal-infant care across two semesters, the registrar may need to estimate how hours broke down across the listed areas. Ask your registrar to contact CGFNS directly with any uncertainty. Asking is far cheaper than guessing and drawing a deficiency notice.
Brief your registrar on the two failure points before they start: the seal must sit over the signature, and no subject area should be left blank if your program covered it.
If Your Records Aren’t in English
All documents submitted to CGFNS must be in English. If your nursing program was taught in another language, the educational institution itself is responsible for providing the English translation of your transcript and academic records.1CGFNS International, Inc. CGFNS Certification Program CGFNS does not accept translations from freelance translators or commercial translation services you hire on your own.
If your school can’t produce an English translation, CGFNS will translate the documents for an additional fee.1CGFNS International, Inc. CGFNS Certification Program The school still sends the original-language documents directly to CGFNS in a sealed envelope, and CGFNS handles the translation internally. Sort this out with your registrar early so you know whether to budget for it.
Submitting the Form
This is where the most applications go wrong: the completed form must travel directly from the school to CGFNS. You cannot touch it after the school has filled in its section. Any form that passes through the applicant’s hands after the institution has completed it is automatically disqualified.
The school places the finished form and any attachments in an envelope, then stamps or seals the envelope flap with the institution’s official seal.3CGFNS International. CGFNS Nursing Education Form The sealed envelope goes to:
CGFNS International
3600 Market Street, Suite 400
Philadelphia, PA 19104-2651 USA4CGFNS Connect. Contact Us
International mail can take anywhere from one to six weeks depending on the country and service. A trackable international courier such as DHL or FedEx is worth the extra cost, because both you and the school can confirm delivery. Watch your TruMerit account for the status update that confirms CGFNS logged the envelope.
What Happens After You Send It
Once CGFNS has all required documents and confirms they are complete, the standard evaluation takes roughly twelve weeks. Evaluators compare the hours and subjects on your Nursing Education Form against U.S. educational benchmarks for the nursing profession you’re applying under.
If you need results sooner, CGFNS offers expedited review. For the CES Professional or Academic Report, expedited service costs $425 and targets processing within ten business days after all documents are received and processed.5TruMerit. Fee Schedule and Policies The VisaScreen expedited review carries a $500 non-refundable fee.6CGFNS International, Inc. Make Sure Your VisaScreen Certificate Is Current One caveat worth understanding: expediting doesn’t guarantee a finished report in ten days. It guarantees a faster review and faster communication of any outstanding issues. If your school sent an incomplete form, expedited processing won’t shortcut the correction cycle.
If CGFNS Finds a Problem
If the form has errors, missing signatures, an absent institutional seal, or incomplete hour breakdowns, CGFNS issues a deficiency notification through your online account specifying exactly what needs correction. Your school then prepares and sends a new, corrected version of the form — again directly to CGFNS in a sealed envelope. Each cycle can add weeks or months to your timeline.
The deficiencies that come up most often are predictable: the seal not covering the official’s signature, hours left blank for a required subject area, missing dates of attendance, and school names on the form that don’t match the transcript. Keep an open line to your registrar throughout so you can catch these before the envelope is sealed.
If your evaluation report is issued and you believe it doesn’t accurately reflect your education, you can request a re-evaluation. The fee is $295 for either a CES Professional Report or a CES Academic Report.5TruMerit. Fee Schedule and Policies Have specific reasons and supporting documentation ready before paying for one; a re-evaluation produces an additional report, not a rewrite of the first.