If Anatomy and Physiology is the HESI A2 section keeping you up at night, you are in good company — and the problem is usually not that the content is hard. It is that the topic list is enormous and the section is short, so studying "all of A&P" is both impossible and unnecessary.
The short version: the HESI A2 Anatomy & Physiology subtest is a short, broad multiple-choice section covering general terminology, anatomical structures, and body systems with their functions and relationships — so the winning strategy is wide, shallow coverage of every system rather than deep mastery of a few.
This guide covers the section's format, which systems deserve your hours, what you can safely skim, a worked sample-style question, and how to keep A&P from leaking out of your head before test day.
What is the format of the HESI A2 A&P section?
It is a computerized multiple-choice section of roughly 25 to 30 questions, and both the exact count and the time limit depend on how your school configures the exam. This is the single most important thing to understand about the HESI A2: Elsevier publishes the exam, but your program chooses the subtests, the administration format, and often the timing.
Some real published examples show how much this varies:
- Tarrant County College lists Anatomy and Physiology at 30 questions inside a five-hour total administration, and notes that if your intended program does not require A&P, your score on that section is disregarded.
- Lone Star College requires A&P among six sections, allots four hours and 45 minutes for the whole exam, and uses the A&P score as the first tiebreaker for nursing admission.
- Paradise Valley Community College does not administer the science sections at all for its own nursing applicants, but offers them — untimed — to students testing for outside programs.
- Arizona College of Nursing includes A&P among four required subtests and notes a four-hour allotment, while cautioning that the number of questions may vary.
Two takeaways. First, confirm your own program's question count, timing, and section list in writing before you build a study plan. Second, notice the Lone Star detail — where admission is competitive, A&P can function as a tiebreaker, which means "just clear the minimum" is often the wrong target.
What topics are on the HESI A2 A&P section?
Elsevier describes the subtest as covering general terminology, anatomical structures, and body systems along with their functions and relationships. In practice that means a little of everything: directional and body-plane terminology, the organizational hierarchy from cells to tissues to organs, and then every major system.
The table below is our editorial prioritization for students with limited time. It reflects how broadly each area shows up in published topic descriptions and how much it overlaps with the rest of the exam — it is study guidance, not a statistic about item counts, which Elsevier does not publish.
| Area | What you actually need to know | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Anatomical terminology & body planes | Superior/inferior, proximal/distal, medial/lateral, anterior/posterior; sagittal, frontal, transverse planes; body cavities and quadrants | High — cheap points, small topic |
| Cells, tissues, histology | Organelle functions, the four tissue types, mitosis vs. meiosis, membrane transport basics | High |
| Cardiovascular system | Heart chambers and valves, path of blood through heart and lungs, arteries vs. veins, blood components | High |
| Respiratory system | Airway structures in order, gas exchange at the alveoli, mechanics of inspiration and expiration | High |
| Skeletal system | Axial vs. appendicular, major bone names, joint types, bone functions including calcium storage | High |
| Muscular system | Three muscle types and where each is found, origin/insertion concept, basics of contraction | Medium-high |
| Nervous system | CNS vs. PNS, neuron structure, brain region functions, sympathetic vs. parasympathetic | Medium-high |
| Digestive system | Organs in order, what each accessory organ secretes, where absorption happens | Medium |
| Urinary/renal system | Nephron as the functional unit, filtration and reabsorption, fluid and electrolyte balance | Medium |
| Endocrine system | Gland-to-hormone-to-effect chains for the major glands | Medium |
| Integumentary system | Skin layers and functions, thermoregulation, accessory structures | Medium |
| Immune/lymphatic system | Innate vs. adaptive immunity, lymphatic structures, white blood cell roles | Medium-low |
| Reproductive system | Major structures and their functions, gamete production | Medium-low |
High-yield versus low-yield: what to skip
With a section this short, depth is a trap. If you can answer a straightforward question about every system, you will outscore a student who mastered three systems and guessed on the rest. That means some things are genuinely safe to skip on a tight timeline:
- Memorizing every bone, muscle, and nerve by name. Know the major ones and the organizing logic — axial versus appendicular, the three muscle types — rather than a 206-item list.
- Biochemical pathway detail. Knowing that cellular respiration produces ATP in the mitochondria matters. Reciting each step of glycolysis does not.
- Clinical pathology. The HESI A2 is an entrance exam that tests normal structure and function, not disease management or nursing interventions. If a study resource has you learning treatment protocols, you are studying the wrong thing.
- Sections your program does not require. Worth repeating because it is the most common wasted week in HESI prep: several schools do not use A&P at all, and others disregard the score if your intended program does not require it.
What is genuinely high-yield is structure-to-function pairing. Nearly every A&P question, in the end, is asking "what does this thing do?" or "where does this thing sit relative to that thing?" Study in those two shapes and the material starts to feel repetitive in a good way.
A sample-style question, walked through
Here is an original question written in the style the section uses, with the reasoning spelled out. Try it before reading on.
Which structure prevents blood from flowing backward from the right ventricle into the right atrium?
- Mitral (bicuspid) valve
- Tricuspid valve
- Pulmonary semilunar valve
- Aortic semilunar valve
The answer is the tricuspid valve. Here is the reasoning pattern that gets you there without memorizing the question:
- Locate yourself first. The question names the right ventricle and right atrium, so you are on the right side of the heart. That alone eliminates the mitral valve (left atrium to left ventricle) and the aortic valve (left ventricle to aorta).
- Then ask which direction. Between an atrium and a ventricle you have an atrioventricular valve; between a ventricle and a great artery you have a semilunar valve. The question describes backflow from a ventricle into an atrium, so it must be atrioventricular. On the right side, that is the tricuspid.
- Check the leftover distractor. The pulmonary semilunar valve is on the right side, which makes it tempting — but it sits between the right ventricle and the pulmonary artery, not between the ventricle and the atrium. It is the right neighborhood, wrong doorway.
Notice that the trap answer was not random. Well-written A&P distractors are usually correct facts placed in the wrong location or the wrong direction. When two choices feel plausible, ask which one is in the right place, then which one points the right way.
How to study A&P for the HESI A2
Sequence beats intensity here. A workable order:
- Diagnose before you study. Take a short diagnostic across all the systems so you are ranking your actual weaknesses, not your remembered ones. Most students discover their fear of A&P is really a fear of two systems.
- Work one system per session, weakest first. For each, write down the structures, one function per structure, and how the system connects to a neighbor. That last part matters — questions about relationships between systems are common.
- Study visually, with real labeled diagrams. A&P is a spatial subject, and text-only review is why students can define a structure but not place it. This is exactly why our HESI A2 lessons use real labeled anatomy diagrams from openly licensed medical sources rather than word lists.
- Re-attack every miss with a variation. When you get a question wrong, reading the explanation is not learning. Answering a differently worded version of the same concept several days later is. If you cannot get the variation right, you memorized an answer, not a concept.
- Finish with a timed run. If your program times the section, practice at that pace at least once. Broad-but-shallow knowledge falls apart when you second-guess under a clock.
How long should I study for the A&P section?
For most students, two to five weeks of focused A&P work at roughly 30 to 45 minutes a day is a realistic range — and the spread is driven almost entirely by how recently you took an A&P course. If you finished A&P I and II in the last year, you are refreshing, and the shorter end is plausible. If it has been several years, or you never took the course, plan for the longer end and start with terminology and cells before touching systems.
We give ranges rather than a single number on purpose. Anyone who promises you a specific score after a specific number of study hours is selling certainty that does not exist in test preparation.
Why A&P leaks out of your head, and what fixes it
A&P has an unusually cruel forgetting curve because so much of it is arbitrary naming with no logical hook. You can learn the endocrine glands cold on a Tuesday and lose half of them by the following Tuesday. Cramming makes this worse, not better, because the material never gets consolidated.
The fix is spaced recall: re-testing yourself on previously learned systems at increasing intervals instead of re-reading them. It feels less productive than fresh study — you are revisiting things you "already know" — which is precisely why most students skip it and then wonder why the systems they studied first are the ones they miss on test day. Build a plan where every system you have covered comes back around at least once a week until you test.
Do I even need to take the A&P section?
Maybe not — check before you study. Programs select which HESI A2 subtests they require, and the science sections vary the most. Some testing centers administer A&P to everyone and simply disregard the score for programs that do not use it; others do not offer the science sections at all. If A&P is not on your program's list, every hour you spend on it is an hour not spent on the sections that decide your admission.
If it is on your list, treat it as the section most worth your attention. Our full breakdown of all eight HESI A2 sections shows where A&P sits relative to everything else, and the math section — the other place students lose avoidable points — has its own mechanical fix. Confirm your section list, diagnose your gaps, and work them one system at a time. Broad and steady wins this one.