Can anyone explain the logic behind nursing exam questions?

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It's been established that we get questions that are tricky, contradictory, wrong etc etc... But how do you answer them correctly regadless of their flaws?

Could you answer this, for instance -- which one has a priority? - potassium imbalance, calcium imbalance, sodium imbalance, acidocis or alkalosis? Please. I don''t know the answer.

Please share your secret (we all use fake names here) - do you pick the longest answer, the shortest or answer C?

What do you do when you know the material well, give the most correct answer, and then find out that your answer is wrong? And the correct answer is some insignificant piece of information that you found lurking somewhere in the text, and you wouldn't choose it in a million years? Does it mean that the nursing logic is beyond you? What does it mean when you study hard for the exam, know and understand it well, and get a much lower grade than you received for the exam you hadn't studied for at all?

Please help :confused::uhoh3::uhoh3:

it's interesting though... why is it that no other program or class other than nursing have students constantly voicing similar opinions -- that the exam questions are not worded right, that the content of the exam is not covered in lecture, "too many questions were formatted so a person who was very familiar with the material was likely to be tricked into selecting the "wrong" correct answer." (from 2ndyearstudent male.gif) etc etc

i don't remember students taking math, physics, biology, psychology, computer science, english, spanish, logic, history to have these kind of problems with tests... something to think about

you mean nursing students on allnurses aren't complaining about computer science test questions? yes, that is a puzzle:uhoh3:

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Specializes in Med/Surg, ICU.

How often do you lurk around forums for students in other degrees besides nursing?

Actually, more importantly, how many other degrees offer tests that are not strictly regurgitation of memorized facts? Seems to me that all my science pre-reqs were very much into that style of testing with the exception of my anatomy class where the instructor was notoriously difficult (but awesome!) and required students to think a little more in depth with the information provided on the lecture portion of his exams. Seems to me many students complained about his tests as well.

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How often do you lurk around forums for students in other degrees besides nursing?

Actually, more importantly, how many other degrees offer tests that are not strictly regurgitation of memorized facts? Seems to me that all my science pre-reqs were very much into that style of testing with the exception of my anatomy class where the instructor was notoriously difficult (but awesome!) and required students to think a little more in depth with the information provided on the lecture portion of his exams. Seems to me many students complained about his tests as well.

I seem to remember many complaints about both my Gen Chem and Organic Chem test questions.

They sounded familiar, "not worded well, and of course the perennial favorite, "the questions were unfair."

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OK, here's an example. It's not verbatim, but pretty close -- how do you promote deep breathing in a post op patient?

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Specializes in Peds/outpatient FP,derm,allergy/private duty.

*****

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But it's the ability to do this that separates the BSN prepared nurse from the task-oriented activities associated with a technical or "how not why" emphasis education. Formulating the Nursing Diagnosis can only be done by the BSN, though data collection can be delegated to other members of the healthcare team. The entire nursing care plan cannot be formulated until the Nursing Diagnoses are identified first.

Huh? There aren't enough threads (heck there's an entire forum) to debate this?

I suspect you were trying to be sarcastic.....my advice, try again.

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What you said is clear, so don't tell me what I do or don't understand. I graduated this last year actually. You say that they cloud it with irrelevant information. Well hell, they do it on purpose. That's to get you to actually "THINK" some. Where's the fun in giving you a cut and dry straight up question with no other information? In my opinion...if you actually KNEW the material and learned it, they could throw 100 random useless facts into the question and you'd be able to pick out what you need, pick the right answer, and move on. Also the reason you don't hear about other professions whining and complaining is well, it's not discussed on a site for nursing. I'm sure if you searched for any other forum you'd find similar things from the select few who are disgruntled. The other reason is very simple, some people are just born to whine and complain and push blame onto others. Nursing school has a LOT of that. Some people say that nursing students are some of the whiniest healthcare students out there. What's your opinion on that?

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how do you promote deep breathing? Well what are my choices? And not being verbatim could be kind of important, try again

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OK, here's an example. It's not verbatim, but pretty close -- how do you promote deep breathing in a post op patient?

An example of what? A test question? If so, is it short answer, or multiple choice?

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thank you all for your replies. as it happens, i actually did figure out the logic behind nursing exams.

people! why are you kidding yourself - or more accurately - why are you misleading good students -- about critical thinking? critical thinking has nothing to do with this. nurses are discouraged from using any thinking, they just have to do exactly as they're told. those struggling students -- don't try to apply your real critical thinking -- it is suitable for doctors. no thinking or deep knowledge is required from you when you have to write "altered urinary elimination related to bacteria in urine" instead of "uti"....

another thing i'm tired of hearing is "oh you have to find what the stem or key words of the question is" -- this is nonsense. in english language the subject and the predicate indicate the stem and the key words of a sentence, and word placement in the beg or end of a sentence. some exam questions don't follow these rules - their idea of a stem is arbitrary.

other "exam strategies" are also bs.

sometimes you can make a mistake by not paying 1000% attention to every word of the question and all of the choices. you feel like you're being tested on "find 10 differences between these two pictures" instead of on real knowledge and skills, and no "exam strategies" will help you with this. the point is - that the "big picture" is outside of the scope of nursing, while your instructors and textbooks try to give you a different impression - that's what you study and that's why you fail.

nursing exams test you on a very narrow and very specific knowledge that you need to have -- i.e. how to position a client for procedure, what the procedure is for, what will happen after procedure, what to watch for and what to do in emergency, - to sum it up. nursing has never been a profession designed for very smart people; if you've ever seen older nurses, those bleached blondes with husky voices, you know what i mean. provided, there are exceptions, and what's changing today is that a lot of really intelligent people are getting into nursing programs while teaching plans and exams hasn't changed to accommodate them. if you are smart, you will make a better nurse, i believe; but the thing is - you don't have to be smart to be a nurse. of course a smart person will eventually figure out one way or the other how to ace those exams, but i also think that a lot of people who could be great nurses are failing because they don't realize that the exams are indeed more stupid that they are. they think that there's something wrong with them, while the only thing that's wrong is that they haven't figured out what they have to study - or rather - that they don't have to study at all, but just look at very specific and very few points and memorize them -- to pass the exams...

people who've created these exams had to make sure that stupid people getting out of nursing schools know specifically what to do in each situation. if you look at the scope of a major nursing exam, you will realize that it's very narrow -- if our textbooks and lectures reflected the exact things we need to know -- they would be very brief and thin.

people who make these exams are trying to take something very simple and cloud the issue to make it look difficult and complex, and in the process they often make no sense. for instance, all you need to know about patients who are unconscious is to turn them sideways so they don't aspirate. that's so simple, but the required 100 pages of text won't mention it, or mention it without emphasis. then the exam question is asking what do you do in this situation, while trying to make sure that you don't guess the right answer by clouding the issue with other info. all this other stuff that you were reading about is not important, you turn an unconscious pt on their side - and that's all you need to know or pay attention to... you probably would have answered the question correctly if the question and the choices weren't worded like you're about to try to solve the theory of relativity problem, you assume that the answer is complex because of the way everything is worded, because of all the tons of stuff you had to learn and memorize...

why are they doing it? why are they trying to stuff your head with other information that is very dense? they're only testing very simple piece of knowledge that a retard would get if you just told him. that i haven't figured out yet, but here's my theory - they do it for precisely the same reasons as the military testing that eliminates people who are too smart. why? because when you're intelligent and a thinker, it is well known that when you have a certain protocol to follow, you might notice other details and use your thinking to decide that a different solution is better. you might be right, but if you're not, you and your hospital and the entire nursing field will be liable. so they want you to follow the exact steps, and maybe the less intelligent you are, the easier it is for you to isolate those steps in the text, i.e. you are more likely to memorize something so simple as turning the patient rather than something more complex. it's just a theory and maybe it's not crystallized yet, but i believe something to this effect is taking place...

my only word of advise to those intelligent students struggling with the exams - please understand, that unless you have an absolute photographic memory, -- don"t try to master nursing exams by reading and rereading all of your assigned chapters. you will not get an a or even b by doing that. also don't think that your test taking strategies are bad.

think of other solutions.....

no...the issue is not that you're too much of a critical thinker and too smart for nursing school. that much is pretty clear.

fwiw, i've heard plenty of similar complaining in my science and non-science prerequisite classes. there is not shortage of students who think that doing badly on a test or not understanding the question means that the test is stupid and unfair. maybe nursing seems to have more because people go in to it expecting it to be easy and then are shocked to find it a rather rigorous program.

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Specializes in Ante-Intra-Postpartum, Post Gyne.
But it's the ability to do this that separates the BSN prepared nurse from the task-oriented activities associated with a technical or "how not why" emphasis education. Formulating the Nursing Diagnosis can only be done by the BSN, though data collection can be delegated to other members of the healthcare team. The entire nursing care plan cannot be formulated until the Nursing Diagnoses are identified first.

Hu? Do you mean RN vs LVN? Last time I checked RN is RN regardless of BSN or ASN...ASN nurses can write a nursing diagnosis just as well as a BSN nurse.

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OP - I think I understand what you're getting at when you say it feels more like being tested on "find the differences in these two pictures" than on useful, relevant knowledge, understanding and judgement. My experience, too, was that while we given tons of material to cover in text, having studied that material thoroughly didn't seem to help on tests and in fact could end up confusing me on tests as I'd be reading way too much into a question.

So I hear your frustration. However, there's only so much you can do while you're in the thick of it as a student. No matter how valid your issues may or may not be, you've still got to get through your tests which means learning to live with "the logic behind nursing exam questions" - which at times may not seem as logical as it could.

Personally, my experience was that it seemed some instructors wrote tests such that the only way to get 100% is to have a few lucky guesses or to have flat out chosen the right answer for the wrong reasons. Study the texts and get further background information for your own knowledge even if it doesn't seem to help your test performance. Practicing NCLEX review questions can help "get a feel" for these types of questions.

If you continue to have strong feelings about this even after you finish, then maybe you can help influence nursing education for the better in the future.

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