Clinical pass/fail or a grade

[LilyRN99]

Is your nursing program's clinical pass/fail or given a numeric grade?  My school gives a numeric grade.  There are 26 categories and we have to score them between 0-6 for each category.  A 6 would mean the student could do the activity perfectly and independently.  So a student can't do activities independently in the beginning so they would be earning score like 3-5 for a category.  I feel bad that a student could be an attentive and hardworking student, do everything that was required of them, do a great job on paper work and still not be able to achieve an A for the day because their skills still need practice.  A score average of 5-5.9 gives then a grade of 90 which is the highest possible grade since we don't give out 100s for clinical.  It also means that a student who is getting all 90s but is absent one day (and gets a zero for the day) also cannot achieve an A.  

[Damion Jenkins, MSN, RN]

The school I worked for was pass/fail. Clinical was not a separate course from the classes, so the letter grade they receive was for lecture. Clinical and Skills lab were pass/fail. 

[steph6737]

That sounds pretty intense! Our clinical is pass/fail as well. It is 1/3 parts of one of our classes, so as the previous poster said, lecture will count for the grade and our clinical and lab are both pass/fail. 

[jeanbeth, MSN, DNP, RN]

Pass/fail at my school. None of my students would earn a passing grade in clinical - they are students who have no healthcare experience with live patients. We bring them along slowly and carefully and watch for their development. At least we did, until we got kicked out of our clinical sites due to increasing numbers of COVID cases

[LilyRN99]

12 hours ago, jeanbeth said:

Pass/fail at my school. None of my students would earn a passing grade in clinical - they are students who have no healthcare experience with live patients. We bring them along slowly and carefully and watch for their development. At least we did, until we got kicked out of our clinical sites due to increasing numbers of COVID cases

It’s a lot of work doing the grade sheets for clinical. We haven’t had clinical in a facility since March.  Now we assign a case study that gets graded and one day is at the school to practice on manakins and they get basically a participation grade. 

[londonflo]

When I first taught we did have numerical grading and it was a pain. Developing a tool for that is hard because you need to build in a student is working toward the goal of being competent and maybe even proficient. It was impossible to get content validity and interrater reliability.  Student learning is not a 'one-size fits all'.

On 9/3/2020 at 9:41 AM, LilyRN99 said:

Is your nursing program's clinical pass/fail or given a numeric grade?

We went to pass/fail in the 80s and it is so much more manageable.  There are a lot of articles on this type of clinical evaluation being preferable. 

What happens if a student fails clinical and passes the course or vice-versa? Classroom content should be related to clinical and clinical related to classroom for best learning.