Starting to think there should be some limits...

Nurses General Nursing

Published

....on what a new AN member can do. For instance, you must be a member for 6 months before you're able to post a question. The homework issue is really getting out of hand!

Students don't even beat around the the bush or try to camouflage what they're doing. They just flat-out demand homework answers. Somewhere, it must be written that AN.com is the place to get your homework done.

Specializes in Nephrology, Cardiology, ER, ICU.

Appreciate the comments. This is at the top of the Nursing Student Assistance Forum (which everyone must look at prior to posting):

Congratulations on being accepted into a nursing program! This is the place for nursing students to consult the membership to share knowledge, ideas, and experience, and to explore ways to maximize success in nursing school. Feel free to seek assistance with difficult content, care plans, interviews, papers, study questions, dosage calculations, and other academic challenges you are facing. This is NOT the forum to ask someone to do your homework for you. When asking for assistance with an assignment, please show what you have done first.

Staff work very hard to keep these type of questions in this forum. If you see these types of questions, please report them and we will gladly move them. There ARE posters that really enjoy helping students to learn. And then there are other posters that would rather not read these questions. Just bypass this forum...

Please feel free to contact an admin or staff member if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks everyone.

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Specializes in retired LTC.

This has been a very informative & thought provoking post. I found myself talking aloud in response to quite a few of the postings. (Yes, I'm one of those people who talk to themselves.) However, I don't think I've seen one particular issue addressed during all the discussions.

I sometimes cringe when a post starts "I made a mistake"!!! I'm NOT talking about the simple, garden variety mistakes. I mean the 'take your breath away' mistakes that exposes the OP to scrutiny and self-incrimination of serious nature. The OP then goes on 'confessing' details on open forum that make defense attorneys 'want to crawl into a hole' and prosecuting attorneys start to salivate.

We COBs know better - we know less is best. But I believe and understand newbies' naivete and overwhelming 'guilties' motivate them to post. But in reality, they are hanging themselves out to dry. Their 'confessions' just may be causing them to loose their licenses, their assets and their livelihoods. They just don't see it!!! In no way shape or form do any of us want to see one of our fledgling or peers 86 themselves.

(And the "I made a mistake" issue is NOT just relegated to newbies.)

On a related tangent, some posters become so indignant when we suggest they avoid using identifying names and/or pix for safety and possible backlash. Or we'll read a post 'why is that supervisor/unit manager/PRECEPTOR always following me or reading & correcting my notes?'. That's the reasons above and NO, we are not being 'rude', 'bullying' or 'NETY'.

If AN administration can screen for 'naughty' words, could they not screen for "I made a mistake".

After all, 'there but for the grace of God ...'.

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Oh dear . . . . I'll admit to having my nursing cohort from my RN to BSN program use AN to ask nurses' opinions regarding nursing theorists. It wasn't a homework question per se .......... just a way to get opinions on the relevance of studying nursing theorists in school. This was about 10 years ago.

There have been threads about this before but we were interested in a current response. We did have some nice folks who did respond for us.

I hope anyone reading that thread I made wasn't rolling their eyes . . "oh no, another homework question!". :sarcastic:

;)

There's a difference between saying, "A bunch of us are studying nursing theorists, and we are having a hard time figuring out why we are assigned this material. Some of us think it's busywork that has no application to what we do in the clinical area. I kinda like Callista Roy's way of looking at things. What do you folks think now that you've been out of school awhile?"

and

"What are the differences and similarities between four major nursing theorists?"

Which one is going to get me to give you a thoughtful answer with links, and which is going to get me to respond, "Homework question? What research have you done on four theorists, and what do you think?"

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Appreciate the comments. This is at the top of the Nursing Student Assistance Forum (which everyone must look at prior to posting):

Congratulations on being accepted into a nursing program! This is the place for nursing students to consult the membership to share knowledge, ideas, and experience, and to explore ways to maximize success in nursing school. Feel free to seek assistance with difficult content, care plans, interviews, papers, study questions, dosage calculations, and other academic challenges you are facing. This is NOT the forum to ask someone to do your homework for you. When asking for assistance with an assignment, please show what you have done first.

Staff work very hard to keep these type of questions in this forum. If you see these types of questions, please report them and we will gladly move them. There ARE posters that really enjoy helping students to learn. And then there are other posters that would rather not read these questions. Just bypass this forum...

Please feel free to contact an admin or staff member if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks everyone.

But, alas, honored more in the breach than the observance.

That makes this question reappear: If somebody is posting an egregious "do my homework for me" question (and I give a somewhat wider berth to obvious international students or people with very poor English), do you want us to report it so you can send out an autoresponse that says, "We don't do your homework for you. We want to help, but please show what you have done first, and then come back"? Would you do that? It would make life SO much easier. Pleasepleaseplease?

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This has been a very informative & thought provoking post. I found myself talking aloud in response to quite a few of the postings. (Yes, I'm one of those people who talk to themselves.) However, I don't think I've seen one particular issue addressed during all the discussions.

I sometimes cringe when a post starts "I made a mistake"!!! I'm NOT talking about the simple, garden variety mistakes. I mean the 'take your breath away' mistakes that exposes the OP to scrutiny and self-incrimination of serious nature. The OP then goes on 'confessing' details on open forum that make defense attorneys 'want to crawl into a hole' and prosecuting attorneys start to salivate.

We COBs know better - we know less is best. But I believe and understand newbies' naivete and overwhelming 'guilties' motivate them to post. But in reality, they are hanging themselves out to dry. Their 'confessions' just may be causing them to loose their licenses, their assets and their livelihoods. They just don't see it!!! In no way shape or form do any of us want to see one of our fledgling or peers 86 themselves.

(And the "I made a mistake" issue is NOT just relegated to newbies.)

On a related tangent, some posters become so indignant when we suggest they avoid using identifying names and/or pix for safety and possible backlash. Or we'll read a post 'why is that supervisor/unit manager/PRECEPTOR always following me or reading & correcting my notes?'. That's the reasons above and NO, we are not being 'rude', 'bullying' or 'NETY'.

If AN administration can screen for 'naughty' words, could they not screen for "I made a mistake".

After all, 'there but for the grace of God ...'.

The hanging oneself out to dry nationwide expose is one example that would immediately get my attention were I working as staff on this site, but perhaps I interpret sound moderating activity differently.

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Specializes in OR, Nursing Professional Development.
The hanging oneself out to dry nationwide expose is one example that would immediately get my attention were I working as staff on this site, but perhaps I interpret sound moderating activity differently.

Then again, how many mods are there (who I believe are volunteer) compared to the number of new posts daily? No one can read and moderate that many posts; that's why the little yellow triangle exists- I know I've used it plenty.

I do like the idea of having to have a certain number of posts before being allowed to start a thread- that's how it is on the message board linked to my local news, that's how it is on the photography forum I'm a member of, etc. In fact, other than AN, the only ones that don't have a minimum posts before starting a thread are those that require a Facebook login. I think since there's 15 posts minimum before PMs can be sent, that a 10 or 15 minimum post history before being able to create your own thread might help some of the new posters acclimate to the AN culture.

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Specializes in ER.
There should also be a limit to how many self-righteous, annoyingly petty threads you can start..

Those are my favorites!

I've been a member since the early 90's, since before this software was used. There have been some crazy threads, and we are much better regulated than in those early days. Some days every other thread would be student/NCLEX related, and it was a chore to find the meat of the site for us OCN (old cranky nurses)

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Specializes in Med nurse in med-surg., float, HH, and PDN.
And I miss that the off topic posts are now in a separate forum that gets less traffic than this one. I used to love it when they popped up on the "latest" lists!

Hey! I LIKE it that the off-topic posts are in a separate forum; who wants to read all this serious nursey stuff? :blink:

Actually, I come over to the yellow side fairly frequently, I just don't participate as much over here. But I do like learning; there's so much that's new since I was active in nursing in a hospital setting. It's kind of scary!

I tend to stay away from the pins-and-needles NCLEX posts, though.:wideyed: Not so pertinent to me, doncha know.

There are times when I'll read through 7-8 pages of a post because it is sort of like watching a tennis match of words, ideas and personalities.

There are plenty of posts I bypass, though. The only reason I'm posting now is to needle Ruby Vee a little, and say thank you to Farawyn (I like you, too.)

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I'm one of those who...well, this site is kind of a spectator sport for me. I have maybe a dozen or two of posts that I've made and a handful of threads that I've started. Hopefully they decide you're an active member by what you're looking at, not how often you post haha.

I can say, the first thing I hit up is the latest feed, and what I always notice is there is all the same posts about the same schools. I feel like as I scroll I see the same 4 or 5 titles over and over again. Then lately all this bullying in the workplace business. I think a lot of times before these threads get started, especially about school and nclex and all that, maybe if they took the time to search and read we wouldn't get duplicate posts.

But we live in a very me me me right now world, and a lot of people don't think they need to take the time.

I love this site because it is a very overall supportive place and there's a lot of tough love when it's needed and that's something that I can appreciate. But I don't know how everyone takes my posts. The last time I posted it was an iv calculation question that was pretty vague and kind of "I don't get the math" type thing, to which I had said something like, in the words of my favorite clinical instructor, look it up. Seeing as I remember spending a whole two weeks and entire chapter on dosage calculations and I know the how to is in there. To which I was reamed out because she had already tried that and still couldn't get it otherwise she never would have posted, etc. had that been in the op, I would've helped....but all I had been seeing that day was do my homework questions. And honestly, at that point it wasn't even worth the back and forth to argue my stance.

That's the one thing that eats at me...I see all this "I need your opinion" stuff and once they get an opinion, to which the general consensus normally agrees, if it's not what op wants to hear they lash out. That's what makes me not post a lot of the times, the backlash.

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Ok maybe I lied, I have a lot more posts than I thought. 😳

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That's the one thing that eats at me...I see all this "I need your opinion" stuff and once they get an opinion, to which the general consensus normally agrees, if it's not what op wants to hear they lash out. That's what makes me not post a lot of the times, the backlash.

Yep, that's definitely a biggie. Also, a differing opinion is "negative" because it's not what someone else wants to hear. Like I told someone else on another thread, my viewpoint is not negative because it isn't yours, it might just be the most POSITIVE thing offered up at that point!

I think you summed it up well when you used the phrase "tough love". Some people don't understand the concept, they think you should always nod, and smile, and tsk tsk until the other person goes away and does whatever. Me, if I'm going to bother with answering at all, it's going to be honest and sincere. I don't blow smoke up anyone's skirt.

Remember that old childrearing question, "If all your friends were jumping off a bridge, would YOU jump off a bridge just because everyone else is??" Same logic here: If I think you're about to do something stupid, I won't say you're being stupid (that's the rude thing, LOL) but I WILL say "I don't think it's a good idea, I think it's a BAD idea", etc. But then you'll have someone else cluck "well, it's totally up to you if you want to jump off a bridge, after all, it's your life, and no one else can tell you you shouldn't jump....that's so NEGATIVE"! :confused:

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Ok maybe I lied, I have a lot more posts than I thought. ������

LOL, they do creep up on ya!

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