First of all, good afternoon and thank you for providing such a wonderful site! I don't intend for this to be an outlet for my frustration, but if it becomes such, I apologize!
I am in this spring's class of graduating nurses. I have finished the last semester with a high B average. My graduating class has endured a significant amount of discrimination from our instructors (a few bad apples - who did fail- have caused us all to be persecuted). I know this sounds extreme, but in short, the entire testing format was changed on us, we were accused of cheating each semester, tests were changed to be as complex as possible, and requirements for graduation were changed last minute. :angryfire
The last stroke is this (hence my question): A competency test was implemented three years ago. the competency test is written by Kaplan. The past three classes were given the same test (all passed). The instructors selected a new test for us this year. If you fail, you can retake it once the next day. if you fail on the second attempt, you fail nursing school (despite passing the nursing courses). Kaplan recommended the passing grade to be 50%. Our instructors did not set the passing grade until after the test had been completed by all students. The passing grade was set by taking only the highest grade(73) and the lowest grade (51) and averaging them (making the passing grade 63). the average grade in the class was a 58. Hence, only 13 out of 60 passed.
Can they do this legally? the test was not really comprehensive (roughly 50% was psychiatric, 25% was material not covered, 10 % was OB, and the remaining 15% was general med/surg) Psychiatric material is covered in Med/surg 2 and lasts all of two class periods. At a time when we should feel proud to have come this far, we are all terrified that we have wasted lots of $ and time, and that we won't be able to fulfill our goal of becoming nurses! I would be proud to work with nearly all of the students graduating with us and the only people who had questionable character have already failed. We retake the exam tomorrow morning. If anyone has any knowledge of what possible options we have, I would love to hear them! thanks again!
Actually I am graduating from a two year program in two weeks. We had a semester long Psych Class with it's own set of clinicals.
How many of our 'regular' patients have psych issues. You don't have to work IN psych to work with psych!
PB
Same w/my school. We only had one change in our program, and it was explained to everyone...then we had to sign that it was explained & we understood. When I started all of our requirements/rules were explained in detail, and we had to sign this as well.
Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
your question was if they could set the passing rate the way they did, was it legal? probably. there is most likely nothing in your state laws that prohibits the school from establishing how they determine grades in their nursing program. you could check the state nursing law to see if this is addressed on the state board site to see if there is a position statement on grading policies in nursing schools, but i have never heard of any state board interfering with a specific schools grading policy.
i am sure your school's nursing department discussed how the passage rate would be determined. they are very much aware that this test determines whether or not students will get to graduate from their program of nursing. i'm also wondering if this might be a last dig at you guys by the nursing department who believes there was cheating going on just to scare you all a bit. it's sad to think that adults running a program could be that vindictive. however, i have several friends who went on to medical school who told stories of medical school professors that did things like this to rattle the students and "put them in their place" and in the long run never meant to actually flunk them out. this is why most colleges try to be selective in who they pick for their programs and to "weed" out early anyone who is not rn material. also, there is an incredible national shortage of nurses right now. i am sure your nursing school administrators are very much aware of all this. something that you might not be aware of is that it's very expensive for any college to support a program of nurses training. therefore, your program director, like any department manager, has to answer to the president of the college if she's wasting that money budgeted to her department since it's very likely a much larger chunk than most other programs of study get. if she shows a poor student passage rate for the money she's expended, she's got to answer to her bosses for that, particularly if we are talking about a community college that is supported by state tax dollars and is supposed to be serving and giving back to it's community.
i'm assuming you were one of the ones whose grade fell in the failing range since the way you wrote your post seemed to indicate that you would be one of the ones taking this exam for a second time. so, how did you do? how have things turned out?
If it were me, and I didn't pass the test, and the department and/or larger institution wasn't responsive to the normal grievance procedures, I'd get together with other failing students and hire a lawyer. There may be legal issues here to be untangled. When you accept admission to a program it is a sort of contract with the institution (at least to my mind, but I'm no lawyer).
I've never attended a college or university (and I've been to a few) where the degree granting requirements were changed mid-way through (although I'm sure it happens in extraordinary circumstances). The usual protocol is to change the requirements for entering students and grandfather the current students.
Arbitrarily changing the passing grade on a standardized test is bogus. If you really want to make a stink, have all people who passed the test according to their standards but failed according to the school's arbitrary standard contact the state board of nursing, NLN, and everybody else who might be interested in a school headed by some martinet who has gone off the deep end.
You can make just as much trouble for them as they're trying to make for you if they won't back down and appealing to the college dean/president/whatever has done no good. Then arrange to take an alternative exam. The Regent's program comes to mind. It will cost, but you'll salvage all that time and effort you've spent on your education.
You should consider this in the spirit of helping students who follow you. The purpose of nursing school is to produce nurses, not fail them.
Specializes in Postpartum, Antepartum, Psych., SDS, OR.
This sounds familiar. Our last test was made an open book test at the last minute at the request of a student earlier in the day. Great for those that brought their 60 lbs. of books on test night, but for those of us that didn't our grade reflected it. The morale goes down and students loose faith in their instructor and the system when unfair decisions are made such as this.
Wow, a competancy test to pass the whole program? That seems brutal. I thought competancy was measured throughout the whole program with each and every test, skills check off and clinical performance that is administered. For those that pass nursing school, isn't overall competancy in the end measured when passing the NCLEX?
I would rely on NCLEX before I would consider a possibly biased competancy test put in place by the school that hasn't been tested and retested as often as NCLEX. Also, why not give a bit more time between tests so that one may be able to review a particular area that was failed.
It seems as though, instead of advocating for the student, the school is setting up students for failure.
I know in my program, we are tested on competancy through ATI every semester but the results are not included in our grade until the last semester. Even then, the ATI test is only 4% of our 4th semester theory class.
I know this may be a bit off mark, but I had an instructor that seemed to gleam over how hard her tests were and what a nice "fail" rate she had. People came into her class trembling from the first day on.
They actually waited until all the results were in and then set a passing mark that only allowed like 20% of the class to survive? They have no problem with pass rates like that? The BONs have no problem with that? They can stay accredited with that? Nah. I have a feeling they're messing with you and the second exam is going to carry a different pass level with different results. I'll be curious to hear how this turns out.
The university policies at my school had clear grading guidelines. One was that the professor had to state the grading he/she had decided on during the first class and that statement could not be changed during the class. So he would say how each paper or test would be weighted the first day, and you could depend on that. Of course the papers and test guidelines were not handed out on that day- but the university policy was there to prevent discrimination and last minute changes. Bell curves could not be used (that's what your instructors did, kind of) because the possibility HAD to exist that every student could pass or fail, depending on the quality of their work. Check your introductory papers from that class, and then check the facility policy on grading. You may be able to get the grades reinstated.
Specializes in neuro, m/s, renal, ortho, home health.
Sorry this is a little bit late, and you may have resolved this problem by now.
I would first check the syllabus, nursing policy manual and student handbook. I would also talk to the chair of the nursing dept, then the dean. Remember there is strength in numbers. I don't know how a grievance would work but I would try to involve everyone in signing.
We need nurses....I hate to see this type of problem in school. Most of the nursing students are not kids and while in school we all know what it is like to not have a life other than nursing school.
I was not treated fairly while in nursing school. As a result I occassionally post it.
P_RN, ADN, RN
6,011 Posts
Yeah we had 2 semesters divided into MS and PSY. each and 2 semesters of OB and PEDs each.