Hey I'd like to know how people thought the difficulty of their anatomy class (be it a stand-alone anatomy class or the A&P I, II sequence) compared to the difficulty of nursing school classes. I ask this because I was an engineering major in school and I dropped anatomy once because I wasn't doing very well in it (a C is likely what I would have ended up with). I didn't think the material was hard in and of itself but rather it was hard because I never knew what we were supposed to know. Now maybe that's a sign of a bad teacher so that could be part of it.
People might say, isn't engineering hard? Yes, I wouldn't say it was an easy major. But what made it easier is that you can work problems until you are blue in the face and figure out where you need to do work. So unless your professor just pulls a fast one, you can prep for the class and go into an exam with very little doubt that you have matched up your prep to the class.
My anatomy class was completely different. The professor's position was that she was empowered - I heard the phrase "I don't want bad nurses coming out of this class" more than I care to admit and it got old real quick.
Bottom line for me, I'm trying to decide if the difficulty I experienced in that class foreshadows trouble that I'd have in nursing school.
When I was a communications major, I did horrible in science classes. When I switched to prenursing I made As in A&P I & II and Micro because I knew I had to. If you go into the class knowing that grade can make or break your acceptance into a program, you'll be much more focused.
A&P is definitely easier than nursing school though. If you had a multiple choice test in each class, the anatomy test would have one right answer among the choices. A nursing test would have 2-4 right answers and you have to choose the most important one for the particular situation.
My physiology teacher must be the devil after reading these experiences! He in no way makes the class something that can be memorized, and as if the material isn't already a lot to take in, understand, and keep straight, his tests are set up to include 1- 3 "almost" right answers, 1 completely wrong, and 1 correct. Reading the book, listening and taking notes during lecture, and hours of rewriting things and I still have mediocre grades because of his format and not being able to keep 4 chapters of information straight enough in my head to get past the "almost right" choices. I will say that I have a hard time figuring out why/when I am ever going to need to know some of what I am learning, which may be the issue. I am hopeful that my NS material will be something I can apply as opposed to what I am learning now which seems to be so microscopic that my brain doesn't want to learn it!
I did much worse and studied way more in A&P than in my nursing classes. My A&P classes were 250-seat lectures but the teacher knew that almost every student in there was pre-nursing or pre-pharmacy, so she in no way made it possible for us to just memorize the material. If you couldn't apply the material and think about how each thing affected the rest of the body systems, you were screwed when it came to the tests. I studied hours a day every day just to earn a B in A&PI and a C in A&PII. In nursing classes, I'm making A's and B's without studying nearly as much.
klbinaug
67 Posts
When I was a communications major, I did horrible in science classes. When I switched to prenursing I made As in A&P I & II and Micro because I knew I had to. If you go into the class knowing that grade can make or break your acceptance into a program, you'll be much more focused.
A&P is definitely easier than nursing school though. If you had a multiple choice test in each class, the anatomy test would have one right answer among the choices. A nursing test would have 2-4 right answers and you have to choose the most important one for the particular situation.