Alright, I do attend Methodist so I'll try to shed some light. In short: I'm not a big fan. The school feels very disorganized and disjointed at times. Teachers have greatly different ways of how to write an APA paper, and we suffer. The paper work for clinical is very tedious (care plans, reflections, etc) yet the instructors never seem very happy with them. You only get feedback from about half, and only half of those instructors do it in a timely manner. The curriculum gets messed with every year or so. Good luck finishing in 2 years or whatever you had planned if you're transferring. They have it set up so you have at least 2.5 if not more with them. Especially since word is they're eliminating some summer classes.
There are classes that you take that honestly have no point to them whatsoever. I.e., they want your money. Speaking of which, they increased our tuition the beginning of last year. It used to be tiered with just below $400/credit hour for 100-200 level classes, and just below $600/credit hour for 300+ level classes; now they're all around $600/credit hour and there's rumors of it increasing again in the fall.
We have had pretty poor pass rates these past couple of times. 75% or so isn't all that great. They have been nailing us with ATI (which is used at a lot of schools). The problem is, the in class tests are based on our textbooks; while at the end of the year, we all have a big ATI test, which is based on the ATI books, which we were told were essentially a nice supplement, but with semi-frequent errors Yet if we did not get a...I believe a level 2 (regardless of %), we would fail the class. Well last semester we had a mass of us not passing the ATI tests because we learned facts that were just slightly different from ATI. It was a whole stink and the dean had to e-mail the entire school telling them not to worry and they would look into it. It turned out alright for most but that's still ridiculous.
The instructors credentials for the most part are pretty questionable imo. I've had numerous instructors who earned their masters at for-profit and online universities such as University of Phoenix, Liberty University, or Devry. It's hard to accept their credibility. Especially since many just rattle off whatever is on the powerpoints without giving much personal input.
I will not say that the school is hard per se, but it is very tedious and frustrating at times. Some faculty members seem not to care, the President comes off as psychotic. We had maybe 2 or 3 faculty members leave this year alone. I have also seen males picked on perhaps a bit more than the females if that matters to you.
The positives is that the clinical rotations aren't half bad, though it can depend on your instructor. A good number of the nurses who work at the hospital can sympathize with you because they graduated from there and will try to help, you as much as they can, especially if they don't like your instructor
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Your alternatives are OSF and Bradley (for BSN) and ICC (for ADN). For OSF you need to apply over a year I think in advanced in order to get in when you want. But people seem relatively satisfied with the school, it's still stressful, but of course. You also get to do most of your clinicals at OSF which is probably the best and most advanced hospital around.
Bradley, I have friends who graduated from there but I honestly don't know too much about it. I know their prereqs can be wonky. Most seemed satisfied with the program. The bonus of Bradley is that you can live close to campus and have more of a traditional college experience that is unavailable at any of the other programs in the area, if that's something you're interested in. The downside is that it's fairly expensive too. But they are much better with scholarships than OSF or Methodist.
ICC has decent financial aid, not that it's that much of an issue because it's far cheaper than any of your other options. The downside is that you'd only have your ADN and that'll slow you down if you ever want to get into the more advanced specialties. But I have heard pretty good things about the program in all. It, like Bradley goes to a number of different locations for clincals so you are exposed to a variety of things.
Sorry I made this so long but I hope this helps!
Feb 20 by livdream1You may want to check out Methodist's recent NCLEX scores. You can find them here:
