Should I be concerned/

I would be a little worried. Ok maybe more than a little worried. It doesn't sound like the students are being prepared very well. It might just mean you need to take a lot of initiative on your learning outside of school.

thats what i was afraid of! BUT...

i did take a look at older records and they were decent.. 86% and 84% for 2008 and 2007. so confused as to what these scores reflect on.

Yea I wonder what happened since than to cause such a decline.

What is their retention rate? I have heard of programs that have only 50% of the students they started with by the time the graduate.

I wouldn't lose sleep over it. Passing NCLEX has more to do with your preparation than what the instructors did or did not do in your program.

I don't know... There's only so much you can learn from thumbing through textbooks or NCLEX prep books. I would imagine that if you don't understand how to apply the nursing process to real-life situations, things you learned in a lab or in a clinical from a qualified instructor, you would probably struggle on the NCLEX no matter how much prep you did on your own time. Not that studying isn't important, of course!

Your school may have accreditation problems with a pass rate that low.

What is their retention rate? I have heard of programs that have only 50% of the students they started with by the time the graduate.

A friend of mine who went thru an ADN program had this happen. She said it's very common to graduate with half or less of your original class. She said there were 50 of them when she started and only about 20 of the original class made it through.

I would want to know why such a large drop occurred. New faculty? New curriculum? I would at least ask for an explanation. I would also be very cautious.

The retention rate is about 40%!! They did have some accreditation problems.. the program froze and they were at risk of losing it but they didnt.

Guess we'll see tomorrow what its all about!

Also the NCLEX just changed and was supposed to be harder.