Half of the class fails

~PedsRN~, BSN, RN · May 20, 2015

My class started out with close to 100 students, and less than 40 graduated. It's pretty typical.

Newbie_RN17 · May 20, 2015

We started out with 63 and graduated 32 last week, only 13 of us were of the original 63. The people a semester behind us had a majority of the class not passing the semester last I had heard. It happens, a lot.

Emergent, RN · May 20, 2015

Sounds like your schools must be failing to teach. My little ol' ADN program had only one gal fail, and the school had a 98% NCLEX pass rate.

Farawyn · May 20, 2015

Sounds like your schools must be failing to teach. My little ol' ADN program had only one gal fail, and the school had a 98% NCLEX pass rate.

Mine too. We had 1 person leave, 1 get kicked out first semester, 1 get kicked out last semester. We almost all passed the boards, first try (one guy needed 2 tries). This was 1993. ASN.

kblas · May 20, 2015

our class started with 150, then 50 on our fourth semester and now to the 5th and final only like 22 passed. But get this, all average tests scores were 71, what does that tell you?

kblas · May 20, 2015

sounds like my class. We all complained to each other about one of the professors but we never let the program know.

kblas · May 20, 2015

To emergent, thats exactly what is going on. Our class had 3 instructors and one was a horrible instructor and we just failed to notify the program about how bad she was

llg, PhD, RN · May 20, 2015

Sounds like your schools must be failing to teach. My little ol' ADN program had only one gal fail, and the school had a 98% NCLEX pass rate.

Maybe, but not necessarily. The school might have "open enrollment" -- in that almost anyone can get in regardless of their qualifications. i.e. It might be a "lottery" system or a "first come, first served" system of admissions.

Some school let almost anybody in to give them all a chance. Then they have a couple of really tough courses to "weed out" those students who aren't ready to do college-level work.

You can't assume anything or draw any justifiable conclusions from only the bit of information provided by the OP. There are multiple possibilities.

Emergent, RN · May 20, 2015

If that's the case, llg, I disagree with that approach. Better to have high standards in the first place, in my opinion.

When I went to nursing school, it was fairly easy to get in btw. I did have some excellent teachers, I have to say.

My daughter is currently a university student. She tells me that many of the students don't belong in college and got in with mediocre grades, don't take their educations seriously, and are wasting their time and money.

KStudentNurse70 · May 20, 2015

We lost about half of the nursing program this past semester, level 2. Very common in my program though.

canigraduate · May 20, 2015

This could happen for a few reasons, most of which I have witnessed.

1) Random dumb class - sometimes you get that statistically random class where half the people fail because they can't cut it. I kid you not, this happens. The administration does their thing where they review the curriculum, but sometimes it's just a dumb class.

2) Low admission standards - they aren't picky enough about who they let in. I taught clinical for a school that stopped requiring the TEAS. They only did that for two semesters before they realized their mistake. They reinstated the TEAS and I got a cohort that was much better prepared.

3) Poor instruction - sometimes you get the instructor from Hades who can't teach. This happened to someone I knew. The school investigated, counseled the instructor and placed her as a clinical instructor until she had passed some sort of remediation task. As for the students, they hadn't learned anything and couldn't be passed, but they were able to repeat the course without censure. Still had to pay for it, though.

4) Super hard program - The school I went to had high admission standards, great instructors, and a 100% NCLEX pass rate, but only half of us made it through. We are a bunch of darn good nurses. The students who failed were allowed to enroll again (just once, if you failed twice you were out). I think only two or three did that, but the extra experience helped them and they sailed through the second time.