Future Nurses are Brighter Than Ever

Nurses General Nursing

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How do you guys feel that student nurses (in CA) now have to have a 3.5 to 4.0 GPA to even be considered into school? Also TEAS standardized testing has to be at least 90 or above in order to be considered competitive. The GPAs are calculated by Microbiology, two levels Anatomy, Physiology, and overall science GPA. Even if students get past that threshold, they have to write essays, go to panel interviews, and are run through the ringer just to get into school which sorts through hundreds, if not thousands (SDSU) of applicants every cohort.

I'm curious to know if you think you could pass the standards that are employed today for today's nursing students. These students could probably be competitive candidates for medical school, where as in the 70's, 80's, and 90's you probably just had to sign the dotted line to get in. Do you think that if you had to do it again right now that you could get into a program and become a nurse?

I think anybody can become good at something if they do it long enough, especially nursing. But with the level of students that are applying today, the future of nursing looks very bright. I anticipate these new grads will stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and drive the profession into something great.

Specializes in Former NP now Internal medicine PGY-3.

Makes me interested to what the data says about generational performance overall may hit this up on my time off and report back. Doubt it will be nursing specific though but probably more analytical than our assumptions

1 Votes
Specializes in Specializes in L/D, newborn, GYN, LTC, Dialysis.

How do I feel?

I had to have those grades PLUS a high ACT score to even be considered. As far as I see, this is not a new "higher" standard. And I finished school 23 years ago. Nearly everyone had a 3.5 or higher on graduation. New nurses are not "brighter"; that is insulting.

On 4/21/2020 at 7:38 PM, Wuzzie said:

Oh please. Three decades ago it was just as hard. We had to go through the same thing except instead of the TEAS we had the SAT AND the ACT (on which you had to score a 30 or better). Interviews with battle axe instructors who had no wish to be our friends, 3 letters of recommendation and if we got into a school we failed at a C. Followed that with a 2 day long exam on scantron sheets with, as I recall, 2000 questions. So to answer your question, yes, I would have passed the standards and while I don’t disagree that nursing students today are bright they aren’t any brighter than any of us were. You don’t know what you’re talking about and Lord I hope you’re wearing your asbestos undies.

What a stinker of a thread.

AGREED! it really is insulting. Pass the salt.

6 Votes
Specializes in Psych, Corrections, Med-Surg, Ambulatory.

Some of my instructors flat out told us that we were going to blaze new trails and show the old foads how it's done. Thankfully my BS sensors were already operational. Most of my classmates seemed to swallow this hook, line and sinker. Sad to know students are still being set up for the rude awakening.

4 Votes

Its fine with me.. I studied incredibly hard, got straight A's and scored in the top 1% of TEAS test takers nationwide... I'm in San Diego... I sacrificed a lot of my social life to make this happen

Specializes in Emergency.

I can't think of a single profession where the new bright-eyed cohort goes out thinking that they will change the entire system only to be struck by reality once they arrive. No matter how 'smart' they present on test scores.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

2 Votes
Specializes in Emergency.
On 4/24/2020 at 11:17 AM, Tegridy said:

back in my early 20s when I was a bit more brave we had a PHD nurse who would work the floor. She would hound us about the care plan aspect of the charts (they were silly). I got tired of it one day and picked one patient who had everything wrong with him and otherwise it was a slow night so I put in 50+ legit nursing diagnoses. Obviously ms PHD had to address all of these and I’m sure it was supremely time consuming and kept her late and She obv wasn’t happy about it. But hey right back acha. She then went through and deleted all of them which takes forever since you have to explain why they resolved and what not. Ugh

Well played!

Specializes in Med-Surg/Tele/ER/Urgent Care.

WELL the OP last visited Allnurses on April 23!

2 Votes
Specializes in Psych, Corrections, Med-Surg, Ambulatory.
2 hours ago, PollywogNP said:

WELL the OP last visited Allnurses on April 23!

Too brilliant to waste time with us outdated stragglers.

2 Votes
Specializes in Clinical Pediatrics; Maternal-Child Educator.
On 4/24/2020 at 4:55 PM, Wuzzie said:

Nursing Care plans are just pretend doctor’s orders that some over-educated academic decades ago thought would make us seem more powerful than we actually were. Now that we are more powerful they need to go away. There has to be a better way to teach critical care.

I could not agree with you more. As a floor nurse, I didn't look at a Nursing Care plan longer than it took to do the required "update" to it to prove I looked at the thing. If a nurse needs to refer to a Nursing Care plan to know their post-surgical patient needs to get up and move to prevent complications then God help us all.

That said, as an instructor, I do think it adds value to education only in that I can follow the student's thought process and to see if they put in the work to plan their patient's care. I can only hope that they did more that just blindly copy the rationales. After even the slightest bit of experience, the whole Nursing Care plan becomes completely redundant and should honestly be done away with. It's just something else to chart on to say you did something.

5 Votes
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