I've been scanning posts in the nursing student section for awhile to get a "pulse point" Check about what's on students' minds. I'm a longtime educator (11+) years at a major university and a longer time nurse (29 years). I'm also an acute care NP with a PhD. I understand that this site has forums for networking, venting, problem solving and support for students of various levels. I find it utterly fascinating and disturbing about how much of the frustration is displaced to instructors when students' achievements don't match their personal expectations.
Timefor a few realities about faculty:
1. It's hard to recruit and retain good clinicians to teach when the academic side pays much less than the corporate side.
2. We don't set out to trick or "weed" anyone out. We need to know that students have achieved a minimal mastery level of key concepts.
3. There is an expectation that students who want to be nurses will do the work in terms of preparation, reading, asking questions, and coming to class.
4. We expect you to be a thinker and apply the information to different contexts. It is not unreasonable to expect you to pull prior content from other courses through to the patient in front of you right now. Patients will die and/or have bad outcomes if you can't minimally apply key content to different situations and critically think.
i think I'm done lurking here. I wish all the students the best of luck going forward!
Exams are worth as much as 70 to 75% of your semester grade. Quizzes, classroom activities, projects are worth less than 10%. All the time and effort put into clinical prep, writeup, performance, does not help your semester average.
I'll echo a previous post here by saying that clinical prep, write up and performance is CRITICAL to your grade, in my opinion. By the end of my second semester, it occurred to me that I actually learned more from clinical planning, attendance and writing than I did from class and a textbook. The reason for that is that in clinical, you transcend the two dimensional regurgitated facts and you put it all together for real life application. You actually see and digest first hand what the interaction of different disorders is. You see how psychosocial factors play a roll. You put it all together. That, in the long run, prepares you not only for tests, but for actual nursing. Don't make the mistake of studying to test, and being taught to test. Study to be a nurse.
I fully agree there are some lousy faculty. So use the time to teach yourself using the book and syllabus, then blast the instructor in the evaluations. They matter a lot, and are the single biggest factor behind non-renewal of a contract. You may not see that immediately, but in a year or two, she will be gone.
Unfortunately, my college did have have instructor evaluations.
I graduated with the highest GPA in my class, and won The Microbiology Dept's Student of the Year award, but I did in spite of my horrible, evil nursing instructors (there were two of them) not because of them.
Write a letter now. Be specific--don't just gripe, but talk about how they bullied students, were ineffective teachers, didn't know the content, wasted time, gave badly designed tests, etc. . Send it to each of them and the dean. Say how they affected you, and do it in a way that says "I hope you will treat future students better." Give the dean you name and ask her to decide whether to pass it on anonymously to the faculty involved. You have nothing to fear from him or her--they have a lot at stake and want to know about and not renew awful faculty.
ixchel
4,547 Posts
I'll echo a previous post here by saying that clinical prep, write up and performance is CRITICAL to your grade, in my opinion. By the end of my second semester, it occurred to me that I actually learned more from clinical planning, attendance and writing than I did from class and a textbook. The reason for that is that in clinical, you transcend the two dimensional regurgitated facts and you put it all together for real life application. You actually see and digest first hand what the interaction of different disorders is. You see how psychosocial factors play a roll. You put it all together. That, in the long run, prepares you not only for tests, but for actual nursing. Don't make the mistake of studying to test, and being taught to test. Study to be a nurse.
Also..... Did you leave out 15-20% intentionally?