Faculty lowering HESI scores

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Has anybody else ever experienced this in nursing school?

You know how when you take your HESI specialty or HESI exit exams, you get a HESI score and then also a conversion score percentage....well at this program the HESI exams count toward 15% of the course grade, but instead of using the conversion score, the school uses a different rubric. With this rubric, if you score high, it can inflate your grade a bit, but if you score low, it deflates your grade a lot more.

For example, a student scored 1026 on a HESI specialty exam and the conversion score was 88%, but with the faculty's rubric they gave a 90%

on the other hand a score of 739 on a HESI specialty exam with conversion score of 68%, the faculty's rubric gave a 60%.

Does anybody else's school use their own rubric to award grades for HESI???

Does this seem like a fair practice? A lot of people failed out of the program because of this newly implemented scoring. They just started this change this fall semester.

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Specializes in Critical Care, Education.

Obviously I haven't the foggiest idea about your school's methodology, but it may be based upon converting the results to their own derived scale based on a historical data distribution (bell curve). Most commonly, it is used to convert a standardized test score into a normative score; e.g., a score of 75 = an 87%ile score. You can look up various methods for doing this in any Statistics reference.

I can say with relative certainty that they would not be just pulling this out of thin air. There is a specific calculation going on, and it is based upon your school's data. Why don't you ask how it's being done?

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Specializes in NICU, RNC.

Yes. With every single ATI proctored exam, the conversion score was used to award a certain number of points. It was never the equivalent of the conversion score itself. In fact, for the comprehensive predictor exam, if one scored below a 90% conversion, one took a pretty good hit on the overall grade. Thankfully, out of 55 students, only 5 fell below that mark, and the vast majority scored well over 95%, which I think is very telling as to the overall quality of the program. Our course exams were much more difficult than the ATI exams.

If there are a lot of students falling short of whatever goal they have set for you, then they should really examine their program, teaching methods, content, etc. If it's just a few students missing that goal, then it's more likely an issue with the individuals.

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Below is the rubric they are using. In previous semesters they used the conversion score until now. Now this is the way they are choosing to grade all specialty HESI's. A lot of "C" students have failed because it is worth 15% of the course grade and there's no orientation or guidance on how to prepare for HESI. It just seems unfair to me because the conversion score takes into consideration the difficulty of each question answered correctly. I can understand implementing this rubric for the Exit Hesi, because by then the students should be prepared/ preparing for the NCLEX, but for courses prior to the last semester I wish the school would focus more on using the exam as a point of reference on where further instruction/ remediation is needed.

> 1200 = 100

1101 – 1200 = 95 %

1000 - 1100 =90 %

950 - 999 =85 %

900 – 949 =80 %

850 – 899 =75 %

800 – 849 =70 %

750 – 799 =65 %

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