Betrayed by my Program

kgh31386, BSN, MSN, RN · Nov 23, 2010

I'm going to go with another bullet point response..I do have a few questions

1. How were you baited exactly? I would have just done some research and seen what recent graduates and current students have said about the program. Can you go to the dean with your concerns?

2. If they have a 100% pass rate, how many students are in each of the graduating classes? Because a 100% pass rate is usually indicative of adequate preparation from their school.

3. As a student, what grounds do you have to judge the teacher's method(s)? There are countless threads on here about how students try to "one up" their instructors instead of sitting back and really thinking about what's being told. This isn't meant to be attacking or angry, but you're a student..they're the teacher. If the teachers were REALLY that bad, the accrediting body would have heard about it and done something. Every few years the school is evaluated in order to determine their accreditation status. If the school is that bad, they wouldn't be accredited. The committees look at student evaluations, grades, pass rates, etc.

4. Your friends who failed and were on brink of suicide...you say they failed for no reason. There would have to be a reason they failed. You say it's full of 4.0 students, I doubt EVERYONE has a 4.0...and straight A student or not, some people will fail. A lot of students have a 4.0 in pre-req courses and fail in numerous majors, degrees, etc. You can make it into pharmacy school, med school, law school, etc. and fail out.

5. If the bar were impossibly high, people would not attend the program, nor would anyone graduate. If it were really that horrible and unfair, why would they have 500 applicants? I'm sure not everyone of those 500 is baited.

6. It's also interesting you judge the test questions as being subjective. Like I've said before, if one person can pass...the others can as well. I also doubt they really have 10+ questions wrong on the exams. Do you have the opportunity to show them exactly where the question has an error?

7. I wouldn't get an attorney because the truth is..people are passing, and their NCLEX pass rate is 100%. If your friends harm themselves, they have no grounds to blame the program. MIT has the highest suicide rates and people still strive their hardest to go there. It's one of the hardest schools in the nation, and some people can't take the stress..but others can.

8. And test questions will have 2 right answers sometimes, maybe 3. But the proof is somewhere in the book, notes, or they may have just said it in lecture. Just because it's not in the book, or notes doesn't mean the instructor didn't say it. I've heard students say "omg that wasn't in the notes or the book!". Well the instructor said it as a side note or as an example, and the student might have been on their laptop, texting, sleeping, or not even in class..whose fault is that?

To sum it all up, if it's really that awful..you should look at another program. You say you have a license, you can work under that license until you find a suitable program. You should do some research into beforehand though. I hope it all works out. :up:

livelifeloveRN · Nov 23, 2010

I completely understand where you are coming from. I actually felt compelled to respond to this thread because the only other response you received obviously didn't understand that you didn't post this to complain, you posted this for support, and for someone to understand where you are coming from. Yes, nursing school is difficult no matter where you study, but some programs are more challenging that others...and it seems that in your case it is ridiculously difficult. I love the program I'm in now and can appreciate it because I've been to another school that was completely unnecessarily challenging. I honestly believe the professors where there to inflict pain, not teach. Like you mentioned, they would blame the students for their own shortcomings. By the end of the semester only 1/3 of the class remained. Their success rate was so high because anyone with an ounce of doubt of passing was weeded out in the beginning.

The school did choose you though, they chose you because they knew you could do it. This will only make you stronger and make you appreciate being a nurse even more. We feel your pain and good luck!!!

CCL RN, RN · Nov 23, 2010

Lots of people failed out of my program too...Thank goodness! Not everyone should be a nurse. Time to accept that.

I did extrermely well in my program, but I could find probably 50 people who said the exact same thing about my program that you did. How is it that people pass your program and become nurses? Oh, its because they don't act like victims, and cast blame on everyone and everything when they cant get their way.

Baited? Really? I seriously doubt that. At what point do you do your own research?

Here are your options.

Get better.

Move on.

And if people are suicidal during nursing school, then they will NEVER survive nursing!

This · Nov 23, 2010

1. How were you baited exactly? I would have just done some research and seen what recent graduates and current students have said about the program. Can you go to the dean with your concerns?

I did the research and it was implied to me through all the career councilors, newspaper articles, and defunct statistics that this program was the greatest thing since sliced butter. The orientations I attended sold us on the idea that its very hard to get accepted and the application process is very arduous, but once accepted, it was going to be a very positive and supportive experience.

It was all a bogus. Once in, we hit the ground running while trying to sort out expectations from a clumsy hack up of random principles hopelessly deluded in a giant pool of supposition. My instructors didn't bother to converge ideas with each other involving overlapping material such as common drugs and clinical impressions. They were almost never available for private discussion and when they were it was kept brief and always diversionary eg. "That's not my subject." To make things worse I later found out that as a student I couldn't voice my complaints publicly about my own program. The option of talking the dean wasn't really on the table because one everyone was scared of student-staff alienation and we were all still in our first year and convinced the situation was a fluke.

2. If they have a 100% pass rate, how many students are in each of the graduating classes? Because a 100% pass rate is usually indicative of adequate preparation from their school.

It was only the rate for last year, we found out after getting accepted from the second years that their numbers had taken a plunge. Rather then focus on curriculum overhaul they just multiplied the difficulty of their tests by an order of magnitude. I can still pull out pharmacology test questions from the first test we had in second quarter and stump a nurse practitioner. Another fact about the pass rate its still as is, where many students in my year did not seek LPN as well as a lot of second years who have staved off the RN for the time being.

In my experience my ability to pass the nclex was dependent on my capacity to ignore or replace a large part of my lecture and theory knowledge. I had the opportunity to test this understanding with the HESI and that also factored into my decision to go through with licensure. I recall many classmates doing poorly on it and in general they opted out because of the 600 price tag was a gamble at the time.

From my point of view, calling my school a -good- school because the pass rate was 100% is akin to calling a dog -obedient- after you have muzzled his snout and chained him to a fence.

It kind of makes me angry too because my concerns are ignored but my achievements in spite of those concerns is misrepresented to sell my programs image, perpetuating the same problems.

3. As a student, what grounds do you have to judge the teacher's method(s)? There are countless threads on here about how students try to "one up" their instructors instead of sitting back and really thinking about what's being told. This isn't meant to be attacking or angry, but you're a student..they're the teacher. If the teachers were REALLY that bad, the accrediting body would have heard about it and done something. Every few years the school is evaluated in order to determine their accreditation status. If the school is that bad, they wouldn't be accredited. The committees look at student evaluations, grades, pass rates, etc.

I didn't say all of them, but generally speaking, the better the instructor, the less influence they had as part of the whole so in the end no student had a single guide in their corner. The faculty leaders gave no support, consistency, rational, or appeal. The clinical groups were rift with problems and we were informed that our program was fighting for placement in its historic resources and losing ground to universities. This implied that our learning experience was especially scrutinized and would have lasting effects depending on how we carried our program. The rule of thumb was if you reported a mistake like a good nurse, you would face the full brunt of your student contract. The learning environment is supposed to be one where you are allowed a casual mistake or two. Our policy was one strike and your out. I can't tell you how stupid the reason was when they booted one person out from a self-reported clinical error, but believe me when I say it was minor and totally indicative that a quota of discipline was being pursued behind the scenes.

4. Your friends who failed and were on brink of suicide...you say they failed for no reason. There would have to be a reason they failed. You say it's full of 4.0 students, I doubt EVERYONE has a 4.0...and straight A student or not, some people will fail. A lot of students have a 4.0 in pre-req courses and fail in numerous majors, degrees, etc. You can make it into pharmacy school, med school, law school, etc. and fail out.

I can't go into specifics, but as I said, I know for a fact that one out of every twenty or so questions they asked, they took the wrong answer out of their notes. I took them to the testing instructor for my school and they couldn't even reach the teachers to return comment. Emailing the teachers about test questions was pointless and students who did had a very hard time passing subjective clinical outcomes like communication.

5. If the bar were impossibly high, people would not attend the program, nor would anyone graduate. If it were really that horrible and unfair, why would they have 500 applicants? I'm sure not everyone of those 500 is baited.

Its all under wraps. I studied in the main hall frequently and observed the tour guides showing off our simulation laboratories to the freshmen. We only used the sim lab once a term, yet I sat a watch as the tour guides lied through their teeth about all the time we spent in sim and all the incredible functions our simulation mannequins possessed. I also reported this discrepancy to the faculty, yet the same exact thing happened the very next day.

6. It's also interesting you judge the test questions as being subjective. Like I've said before, if one person can pass...the others can as well. I also doubt they really have 10+ questions wrong on the exams. Do you have the opportunity to show them exactly where the question has an error?

I said that the margin of error was about 5%, and that was rather conservative. The point is I don't see the efficacy in failing someone for a 74.4% with those odds. The average hovered just above that with nary an outlier below the established margin of error. We started off first year with the ability to report errors in their tests, but by the end of the year it was basically verboten. The best response I ever got was simply reassurance from the good instructors that "I would make it", absent of an explanation. The worst were demeaning and unpredictable. One minute our books are an all-encompassing resource for my instructors to yank any agreeable citation to affirm themselves with and the next minute I'm hearing an anecdote about the dumb doctor who refused to believe something if it wasn't previously documented. Logic and reason always seem to yield to intuition in my instructors favor. My generation was not raised that way so we experienced a pseudo-ideological clash despite our schools promotion of strictly evidenced based practice.

8. And test questions will have 2 right answers sometimes, maybe 3. But the proof is somewhere in the book, notes, or they may have just said it in lecture. Just because it's not in the book, or notes doesn't mean the instructor didn't say it. I've heard students say "omg that wasn't in the notes or the book!". Well the instructor said it as a side note or as an example, and the student might have been on their laptop, texting, sleeping, or not even in class..whose fault is that?

I guess I would argue that questions involved in science like pharmacology and pathophys don't stray into opinion. We recorded our lectures and those scientific concepts are the only questions I focused on for erroneous statements to pull the 5%. Now and then our outlines included reading, but it was just tacked on as a safety net to cover our instructors backs if they left out a key concept. I knew students who didn't even buy the books and scored A's where as I was struggling with low B's and consuming every assigned page of reading in addition to the lectures.

We all talked about switching programs but by the time we discovered the depth of deception in our second and third term, it was too far gone for us to transfer out to something this fall.

Again, its not hard for the sake of being challenging, its hard for the sake of being hard to force us into filling two molds at once. Our instructors molds, and the nclex's molds, with every and all their repercussions but independent of their guidance or help.

That Guy, BSN, RN, EMT-B · Nov 23, 2010

I did the research and it was implied to me through all the career councilors, newspaper articles, and defunct statistics that this program was the greatest thing since sliced butter. The orientations I attended sold us on the idea that its very hard to get accepted and the application process is very arduous, but once accepted, it was going to be a very positive and supportive experience.

Should have asked the students. Best area for input on the program PERIOD

kgh31386, BSN, MSN, RN · Nov 23, 2010

I actually felt compelled to respond to this thread because the only other response you received obviously didn't understand that you didn't post this to complain, you posted this for support, and for someone to understand where you are coming from.

I never said they were complaining, show me where I said that? And my response was not supporting, you are correct...it was simply asking for some more explanation, and they provided a very in depth explanation.

I honestly believe the professors where there to inflict pain, not teach. Like you mentioned, they would blame the students for their own shortcomings. By the end of the semester only 1/3 of the class remained. Their success rate was so high because anyone with an ounce of doubt of passing was weeded out in the beginning.

And as stated above, not everyone should be a nurse. And really, inflict pain, not teach? We JUST had a discussion about "being the victim". The OP was not trying to form a sorrow group. The suggestion of changing programs is not an option. I would write a letter to the state, the main college(if your NS is part of a bigger school), or someone along those lines. You shouldn't fear the dean.

This · Nov 23, 2010

Thanks for your input, there's always some release in universality. Some of us students have had sit downs before, heads in our hands, trying to find the point to all this. We all can appreciate the need to weed out the dangerously incompetent like the hypo-mathematics or the overly combative students, but goes much deeper then that. Its a teaching failure, we're listening, but I'm not going to memorize the exact word of the teacher when she confuses glucagon and glycogen. The hardest thing for us to swallow was the fact that no one will really know what we dealt with. I have no right to pretend I'm better, smarter, or tougher then your nursing student a county over, but when I see my other friends from the universities having fun I can't lie that I get a little envious.

1/3rd is insanity. That erks me to a bad degree. We're not stupid! we're just not psychic. I suppose it will make me better able to cope with the stresses in the future, but I wasn't planning on acting grim and stoic for at least another five years. I guess will try to collect myself and keep going. Thanks again.

This · Nov 23, 2010

That prev comment was directed to moorejulie, the header was lost when I sent it.

CCL RN
And if people are suicidal during nursing school, then they will NEVER survive nursing!

Right so go ahead and explain that one to the working 40-hour week person minus two significant others IE dead, in the same week that you flunk out of a 3 year commitment to nursing school by a difference of about 4 multiple choice questions from an instructor who proclaims that hypoxia and hypoxemia are the same thing, or that you would not expect any dyspnea in COPD patients, and that your failure was completely intrinsic IE your fault. Please tell me exactly how you would address this persons feelings when you are in this position and what coping mechanisms you would tell them to use. In fact please go on to explain what you would do if you had found yourself in this position, because as you implied, your smarter and stronger then roughly 50 peers so I am quite interested in discovering your secret.

jjjoy, LPN · Nov 23, 2010

I commiserate with you OP. I often respond to posts like yours because while I agree nursing school shouldn't be easy, the level of difficulty ought to be related to relevant knowledge and *real* critical thinking skills, not test-taking strategies and one's ability to 'fly under the radar'. You can also find others with similar experiences. Do you know how to do a search of previous threads?

This · Nov 23, 2010

I commiserate with you OP. I often respond to posts like yours because while I agree nursing school shouldn't be easy, the level of difficulty ought to be related to relevant knowledge and *real* critical thinking skills, not test-taking strategies and one's ability to 'fly under the radar'. You can also find others with similar experiences. Do you know how to do a search of previous threads?

Thanks for the response, as stated before, its good to know that we're not alone in our endeavors. I did a quick browse using phrases like "nursing school impossible/hard/ridiculous" but it did not prove efficacious in locating something more recent, so I guess I felt compelled to play the victim, at least according to CCL RN. But on the bright side I am having a blast with clinicals this term. I was granted some independence under the guidance of one of our best clinical instructors and I've felt right at home with my prioritization and acuity. My biggest distraction is watching others struggle because I'm still with one foot in the door but I've been lucky enough to get some really great RNs who don't mind my constant questions. Sometimes I can put on a pretty good face and bluff some confidence for my patients but without those RNs taking time to teach me, I'd be toast. A round of back pats for preceptors.

CCL RN, RN · Nov 23, 2010

That prev comment was directed to moorejulie, the header was lost when I sent it.
Right so go ahead and explain that one to the working 40-hour week person minus two significant others IE dead, in the same week that you flunk out of a 3 year commitment to nursing school by a difference of about 4 multiple choice questions from an instructor who proclaims that hypoxia and hypoxemia are the same thing, or that you would not expect any dyspnea in COPD patients, and that your failure was completely intrinsic IE your fault. Please tell me exactly how you would address this persons feelings when you are in this position and what coping mechanisms you would tell them to use. In fact please go on to explain what you would do if you had found yourself in this position, because as you implied, your smarter and stronger then roughly 50 peers so I am quite interested in discovering your secret.

I did what I had to do to pass (easy) and didn't spend ANY time online rambling on about fault and blame. There. There's my secret.

Again, if you interviewed the students who failed my program, they'd say all the things you said. And yet, I passed and didn't find my program to be anything at all like the failing students had described. Funny how that is...