Do you have end of the semester competencies? How does your school handle them?

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Can anyone tell me about your competencies at the end of the semester? At my school, we have to perform one of eight competencies that we randomly select. They are all something that we have checked off on throughout the semester. There are four that are sterile dressing changes (just different variations of them), two sub Q injections and 2 IM injections. We have two chances to perform them correctly. If you fail the first time, you must redo the competency that you failed along with a second competency. If you fail a second time, you fail the course with an F. It does not matter what your grade in lecture is going into the competency. Just wondering how other schools do things.

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Specializes in ICU/UM.

We have to do all of our skills. Same deal otherwise, two tries then, the boot.

Just passed mine this morning. It's crazy stressful, IMO.

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I had mine today... I failed and have to retake it:crying2:

I made one stupid mistake and have to retake GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

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Specializes in Emergency Dept. Trauma. Pediatrics.

Ours are called Returns. We have them throughout the semester and our last one we will have a random one already done thrown back in. They used to do it right before our semester where you have 3 tries. Starting with our semester they stopped doing that. They felt that having the 3 limit rule freaked people out to much so they didn't put a limit, BUT you can't move on to the next one until you pass one so if you never get it you will end up failing the semester. Most people always got it by the 2nd time and if they didn't then usually that same day the instructor would go have them go practice more and retest and they would pass. It's nice.

We still have the 3x limit on the Dosage Calc with having to get a 100% but so far we have not lost any students due to clinical failures, return failures or dosage calc failures.

We have lost about 13 students (from 50) so far since we started in August. But all from not passing the class not those things.

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Specializes in ER, progressive care.

We had a lot of competencies my sophmore year, but they were throughout the rotation - not at the end.

In my Foundations class, we were tested out on 4 different nursing skills - vital signs, ROM/ambulation, IM/SQ injections, and sterile dressing changes. In my Health Assessment class, we had various test outs throughout the semester - we usually had 2 body systems grouped together (for example respiratory and cardiac, etc) then our end of the semester test out was a full head-to-toe assessment.

In my junior year, I only had three test outs. Two of them were in my gero rotation - one was on IV's/venipuncture and the other was on trach care & suctioning. The last one was foley insertion during my OB rotation.

I'm finishing up this semester with my first senior rotation (I'm a semester ahead of the junior class now, so I will graduate in December). The only competency we had was a mock code blue where they video taped us and then we watched our performance. It was actually a lot of fun - we laughed a lot and we can hear the instructors in the back laughing, too :lol2: But we did an awesome job!!

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Wow... we don't have anything like that in our program and we are considered one of the hardest nursing programs in michigan... harsh

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