HESI vs Exam grades, or are all programs this, well, funky??

[ByTheLake]

Not sure how widespread HESI and similar exams are in nursing schools. We took ours for our Advanced Med-Surg (last MS class) this week. According to the score explanation, one should make 900 or better (out of 500-1500 possible) to feel confident. I scored 1286, conversion percentile was 99.9%. I only say this here because I'm anonymous, no one in my school knows me here as far as I know. I didn't tell anyone, because *most* students made less than the school requirement.

Now, I had a 4.0 as a full-time student going into nursing school. I still have all-A's in non-nursing courses that I've taken, still full-time, during nursing school. (Most students at my school are part-time students). But in *nursing* courses, I can't pull more (or less) than a B. No matter what. If I give it my all, I get a B. If I give it my bare minimum, I get a B. Either way, it's a 3! But, now it seems as though these B's are not an accurate indicator of what I know, what I've learned, and what I've achieved in nursing school in light of our HESI exams.

Do others find that their scores on these types of tests are at least ballpark-similar to those they make on their school exams? Or do you do way better or worse on the external exams? And RN's, how did these external exams vs. in-school exams predict your success on the NCLEX??

Seems to me that our nursing school powers-that-be might look at these exams and say "hey, our instructors don't seem to be making tests that are acurately testing our students' learning outcomes..." but that doesn't seem to be the case. IN any case, I'm reassured by our external exam, as I *definitely* consider it a better indicator of what my success will be on the NCLEX than our course exams are ;-)

[crb613, BSN, RN]

For the most part all the hesi's I have taken are pretty equal to the grades I make. I have always done well on the hesi's until this one....I failed it & was in complete shock. I will say this was the hardest test I have ever taken most of the stuff on it we had never covered. My understanding of the hesi is that they can be customized w/your schools subject matter or random. In our class 5 out of 19 passed it & most of these people make good grades. I am an A student & I can tell you I struggled with about every question. We do an exit hesi & must pass in order to graduate (3 tries). There were a few that did not pass the exit hesi last year on the first attempt, the school worked w/them & they all ended up passing the hesi & the nclex.Our school has 100% pass rate & tells us that this is an excellent indicator of how well you will do on the nclex.