My wife has said that the application questions on her exams...

seem to be much more difficult than the one's she encounters on NCLEX practice exams. She, and many of her fellow students seems to feel that often the one's that her instructors write (or draw from an "in house" test bank) often have answers that are ambiguous, conflicting, out-dated, or just plain incorrect. Is this common? Do nursing schools deliberately write "bad questions" just to ensure that almost no one can earn an "A". My hypothesis is that the NCLEX questions having been extensively peer-reviewed are much more likely to be good questions. It's not as easy as it may seem to write a "good" question with only one "best" answer, and my feeling is that is usually takes more than one pair of educated eyes for it to happen with consistency. However, my theory doesn't explain why her nursing instructors are not also aware of this simple fact. Most nursing texts come with abundent "test banks" that I would presume are peer reviewed. Why not just stick to those questions?