A few weeks ago, I was informed that I would fail Med-Surg clinical. At the time the semester was still ongoing, although clinical had ended by then. At the time, I was also passing the theory section of that same course. However, since I failed the clinical, that failure counted towards the second failure for me in that program, and the program's policy is to typically dismiss someone after two failures.
I have two main gripes with clinical. First, clinical ended two days before the withdrawal deadline, and while I had struggled early on, I did improve, and my clinical instructor acknowledged as much. Apparently, however, it wasn't enough to her liking, but what I don't get is why she couldn't have given me a heads-up about my pending failure before the deadline, if I was indeed to be failed. Secondly, I disagree with the reasons she gave for failing me. She used errors I had made through the semester as reasons, although I had gone to remediation for those errors. Also, I was out of school for five months prior due to needing to retake a course which wasn't offered in the Fall, so I was rusty in some regards to clinical skills, which contributed to the errors I made. In my time off, I tried and failed to find work, and I also contacted my school to see if I could come in for some sort of remediation so that I wouldn't forget things, but that went nowhere.
Continuing with my clinical experience, there were situations in which there either wasn't an ideal solution obvious to me at the time or in which unforeseen circumstances led me to ultimately look bad in front of my instructor. Also, she claimed that I didn't talk to my nurse or my peers, and while I probably could have asked more questions or interacted more in retrospect, she wasn't following me around the whole shift for her to possibly know that. She claimed that I didn't ask for help, yet I once called a tech to help me turn a patient, so maybe I didn't ask for help as much as she thought I should have. In hindsight, I know the things that I could have improved on, and interacting more with others was probably a major one, but she drew the conclusion that I wouldn't be able to do well in the next semester because of the errors I made (which were all situational, brain farts, and/or addressed by remediation). At times, it was almost like I was penalized for learning, or as if the concept of learning from one's mistakes (AS A STUDENT) was foreign to her. All in all, I feel her evaluation was subjective, and based mainly on what she saw, and on her accentuating the negative.
After failing clinical, as well as having my theory instructor (who also sat in on the evaluation) suggest that maybe being a nurse wasn't for me, despite her only ever seeing me in a classroom with sixty other people, there were about five days that followed in which I was so bummed out and conflicted that I didn't study or really do anything. It was the worst time for me to fall out of the groove that I had established throughout the semester. As a result, I did significantly worse on my third Med-Surg theory exam than on my first two, and while I still managed to pass Pharmacology (which I was retaking), and while I did a little better on the Med-Surg final than I did on the third exam, it still wasn't enough to help me pass the Med-Surg theory portion (I failed it by about a percentage point).
My question is, do I have a case at all for appealing my grade? If I had passed the theory portion, I would have appealed the clinical grade without question, but my failing the theory portion obviously gives me less of a leg to stand on. However, while there was no ideal time to learn that I was going to fail clinical, it also didn't seem fair for my clinical instructor to spring that on me less than a week before an exam (if only for my transcript's sake). I would have rather have found that out either after my finals or before the drop deadline (which, again, is when the last clinical day was). As it turned out, the revelation of my clinical failure, and the uncertainty that came with it, took the wind out of me in the final weeks of the semester, which left me with lower grades on the last two exams than I had on the first two, and lower than what I believe I would have had on them otherwise.