Nursing students have a lot on their plates. They’re learning complex clinical material, demonstrating competency under pressure, and navigating the demands of rigorous academic programs. And somewhere in the middle of all that, they’re expected to submit perfectly formatted APA papers.

For most nursing programs, APA formatting is a persistent, low-level friction point that consumes more time and energy than it should, for students and faculty alike. PERRLA removes that friction. Here’s why a growing number of nursing programs are making PERRLA available to every student from day one.

The APA problem is structural, not a lack of effort

A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Education set out to measure what most nursing faculty already know from experience: students struggle with APA, and the struggle doesn’t go away on its own.

The findings were striking. Across 70 university students, 80% scored below 50% on a pre-test assessing basic APA knowledge. The most error-prone areas were literal citations and reference list formatting – the elements that appear in every paper students submit. And critically, knowledge gaps were consistent regardless of academic level. Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral students all struggled equally.

The study also tested whether providing students with self-paced asynchronous instructional resources would improve their performance. It didn’t, not meaningfully. The conclusion was clear: asynchronous self-study alone is not sufficient to address the problem.

This isn’t a knowledge problem that resolves itself as students advance. It’s a structural one. And the cost of not addressing it falls on everyone: students lose points on avoidable errors, faculty spend grading time on formatting rather than substance, and academic coaches field the same questions semester after semester.

What PERRLA does, and why it’s different

PERRLA is academic paper-formatting software built with students in mind. It handles APA from the very first blank page to the final, submission-ready document – creating the paper, building the reference list, inserting citations, and applying every heading spacing, and margin rule automatically.

Most citation tools on the market – Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, EasyBib – share the same open-source reference engine. They can get close to correct, but they’re rarely exact. And because they only handle references, students are still left to format the rest of the document themselves.

PERRLA’s reference engine is human-built and human-tested, built against the actual APA 7, MLA 9, and Turabian 9 manuals. It handles every reference type and permutation correctly, without students having to double-check behind it. And because PERRLA creates and formats the entire document (and not just the references), it removes the formatting variable from the equation entirely.

PERRLA has been doing this since 1998. Over 1.5 million students have used it. That kind of track record matters when you’re making a program-wide decision.

What happens when every student has access: the WNCC story

Western Nebraska Community College’s TRIO Veterans Upward Bound and Student Support Services programs adopted PERRLA for 125 students across two populations: military veterans transitioning into higher education and first-generation students, low-income students, and students with disabilities. These weren’t students with a surplus of time or margin for error. For them, APA formatting wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was one more barrier on top of several others.

Once students were onboarded into PERRLA, something quietly changed. The formatting questions stopped coming. No panicked emails the night before a paper was due. No students confused about how to build a reference list. The thing that had been a recurring source of friction just … went away. Staff didn’t think much of it at the time. Things were just running smoothly.

When the case study ended, the TRIO coordinators weren’t sure they needed to continue offering PERRLA. So access was temporarily removed.

Students noticed immediately. They went directly to staff: “Don’t take PERRLA away.”

For a population that doesn’t always find time to advocate for itself, that response said everything. These students weren’t asking for more tutoring or more resources. They were protecting a tool that had quietly become central to their academic lives. As one staff member reflected, “those that used it benefited,” and they knew it, even if they’d never said it out loud.

What changes when every student has PERRLA from the start

There’s a substantive difference between a student finding PERRLA on their own and a program making it available to everyone from day one.

When students find PERRLA on their own, access is uneven. Some find it, some don't. Faculty end up grading two different experiences in the same cohort.

When a program provides PERRLA to every student from the beginning, something different happens. APA stops being the thing students dread at the end of the semester when the big paper is due. It becomes a normal, expected part of how they work – from their first discussion post to their final paper. When it’s a daily habit, students start getting genuinely fluent in the style of their profession.

For faculty, it means grading reflects what students actually know and not how well they figured out a citation generator. The formatting variable is removed, and what’s left is the work.

For success coaches and academic advisors, it means one clear answer every time a student asks about APA.

And for administrators, the question isn’t “can we afford this?” It’s “what is it costing us not to have it?” Faculty time, student frustration, grading inconsistency, and the quiet attrition of students who disengage because the mechanics of academic writing feel insurmountable.

Institutional licensing

PERRLA's institutional licensing is designed to make program-wide adoption simple. At $9.95 per student per year, every student in your program has access to all of PERRLA's platforms – PERRLA Online, the Word Add-In, the Google Docs Add-On, and the Chrome Extension – from the moment they start. Every faculty and staff member who teaches in the covered program also receives free lifetime access to PERRLA.

PERRLA can build a site license for programs of any size, from a 10-person doctoral cohort to a 10,000-plus student population.

For programs that aren't ready for a full site license, PERRLA is also building a new Affiliate Institution option. Affiliate Institutions receive a discount for their students, making it easier to support PERRLA adoption without a program-wide commitment.

To explore either option, visit the PERRLA Partners page or reach out directly at schools@perrla.com.