Examination Content Confusing

Hello everyone I am an accelerated RN student in the first semester of a 1 year program and have a question regarding other people's experience with written exams. I would greatly appreciate any insight or advice.

For our school, we are given several multiple choice tests and 1 final examination. Clinical is pass or fail.

The first 2-3 weeks of lecture have been straight forward and focused on introducing nursing to the class along with precautions and basic skills (making beds, taking vital signs). Aside from some relatively heavy amount of reading, I believed the experience to be straightforward. *Don't do this* or *Follow these steps* etc. etc.

However, we had our first test a few days ago and it was extremely frustrating. Our instructors label them "critical thinking exams", but I believe that to be a stretch. I say frustrating because I felt as though there was absolutely nothing I could have done in preparation for this exam; The amount of knowledge base testing that was tested was practically 0 (little material relevant to lecture/book) and we certainly did not cover many of these topics in class. To give an example, the only straightforward question was one presenting a patient with 20/70 vision and asking the test taker to explain what "20/70" means.

The worst part about this exam was that I do not feel the material was difficult at all. Actually, had we gone over this kind of material in any discussion of reading this would have been an incredibly easy exam. The best analogy I can come up with is relating this to going for a job interview. You sit down and expect to be asked questions relevant to your competency and the job at hand, but instead are asked questions like:

1. Do you like my skirt?

2. Do you see this painting here? It was drawn by Da Vinci, what do you think about art?

3. Mrs. Jane Doe, if you were walking in the cafeteria and saw two coworkers chatting and drinking coffee what would you do?

4. If you received an e-mail on the job and it was improperly addressed to you what would be the first thing you would do?

These aren't difficult questions, but you have to know firstly what the person is asking/looking for in an answer, and secondly, you have to know the person himself. I have no idea how to remedy a situation like this. At least if I ran into a test and it was difficult because I was lazy, I could improve. Right now I am just sitting here feeling depressed because, to me at least, this is just so ridiculous and unusual and irrelevant to the material learned in class that I just don't know what to do. I have absolutely no idea what to do. If anyone can please share their insight or help, I would be very thankful.

Thanks.