Passing cut offs

[vonricter222]

Obviously, other nursing students are aware of passing cut offs in nursing school (ex 75% or higher). But I feel like I haven't seen any other nursing programs like mine: for our BSN program, the cut off for passing is 70% and above, however, in some of the classes (not sure why it's only some of them, doesn't seem fair) that's not all. In addition to the 70% cut off in the class we also have to have an average of 70% or higher in the exam section of the class or we don't pass either. If you get a D or F as an average in the exam section, then that is your grade for the course and you don't pass. It seems really dumb to me because I've known many students in our program that have gotten screwed out of this where everything in the class came out to be an A or B yet they were a couple point's shy of that 70% average in the exam section and they don't pass, students who would all make great nurses. Does anyone else have this at their school? I just think it's really stupid. I know 70% is fairly low for nursing programs and seems easy to get for the class overall and exam section. But when it's set up like this, especially when the class had only three exams, it basically says that even if we have one test that we do more poorly on, and everyone has those tests, then we're screwed. Anyone else have this at their school too?

[BuckyBadgerRN, ASN, RN]

Yep, I had an instructor that writes questions for NCLEX too =)

Well, when I was in nursing school, we actually DID have an instructor who wrote questions for NCLEX (shrugs).

[Here.I.Stand, BSN, RN]

It seems really dumb to me because I've known many students in our program that have gotten screwed out of this where everything in the class came out to be an A or B yet they were a couple point's shy of that 70% average in the exam section and they don't pass, students who would all make great nurses.

They didn't get screwed; they didn't earn a high enough grade. "A couple points shy of 70%" even in high school was an F. Why is it "dumb" that an F by any scale is also failing in nursing school--where students are supposed to be learning how to be practicing nurses who are responsible for people's lives? And what about a failing student says "future great nurse" to you? Honest question.

To answer your question, in both my ADN and BSN programs, 78% was needed to pass; this "reflected the minimum standard," so a 77.9999999 was still an F. It was tougher in my ADN program because exams were the bulk of our scores; we had a relatively few amount of assignments. My BSN program was mostly papers, presentations, and online exams; I don't think we had a proctored exam in the whole 5 semesters. So if we followed the rubric, we got passing scores. But all of us who were in that program were already practicing RNs, so it was understood that we had all the patho, pharm, practical knowledge already; we just had to learn more theory.

[CASTLEGATES]

Mine was 80%+, as well. 96-100 for an A, 90-96 for a B and most were 85 (we dropped to #5 in the state and they changed everything).

[brit.pz]

In addition to the 70% cut off in the class we also have to have an average of 70% or higher in the exam section of the class or we don't pass either. If you get a D or F as an average in the exam section, then that is your grade for the course and you don't pass.

This is how my program is ran. They call it "test mastery". We must average at least a 77% or higher to pass any course. After that the rest of our assignments are factored in to out total grade. My program has fantastic NCLEX passing rates. The graduating class of December was 100% 👍🏽