I am so mad and tired of this. A student I know, let's call her Jan, has been cheating the whole time. I caught Jan back when we were doing prerequisites, I thought Jan would never get in, but here they are! Another student recently told me she caught Jan cheating, and was about to turn her in, but couldn't get the facts straight and didn't want to look a fool infront of the instructors if she couldn't prove it. Jan even recently admitted to me that the only reason she passed another class is because she cheated. Now to top it off she is going around bragging about her straight As and how hard she has worked! In addition, she brown-noses and schmoozes, and has secured an intern positon via her buddies, while eveyone else let the progrm director place them. I'm wondering if I'm the sucker and the chump here. I've no doubt she's going to get into the post graduate clinical program, they take the top grading applicants! How can this possibly be fair?
Jan will probably end up on the NCLEX forum someday crying about how she was the top student in her class and yet it's her 9th or 10th time taking the NCLEX and she just can't understand why?
In our program, there are at least four different versions of the exam handed out. At least four of the nursing instructors are in the class while the exam is taking place. No books, phones, cups, water or soda bottles, are allowed. A pencil and a provided calculator. That's it. Once you leave the room, for any reason, you aren't allowed back in. If you're late, you're allowed in, but only if no one has completed their test and left the room. Otherwise, you are taking a different exam on a make-up date.
Our entire grade is made up of our exams. We either pass of fail clinicals; we don't get a grade for that.
I couldn't figure out the reason for not allowing someone to have drinks at their desk when taking exams. My son ended up telling me. He said there was a kid in one of his classes when he was in middle school that had copied a label from a pop bottle, and replaced the writing on it with a cheat sheet. My mind just doesn't think of these types of things.
I cannot even begin to imagine forking out all this money for school, and then not being able to pass the Nclex because of cheating. Jan will be singing the blues when she's writing out that check every month, and still doesn't have a degree!
There's lots of things that can be done to reduce cheating:
essay exams where you choose from a battery of questions
oral exams
different forms of the exam
do a project instead of an exam
take home tests
research projects
Very good strategies and I agree however I dont think this will happen in America.
Or in our lifetime. I would definitely prefer essays.
My school is the US and it does a mixture of everything Daytonite listed except oral exams. It just depends on what semester we are in what we get in addition to the traditional tests.
Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.
How do take home tests reduce cheating?
They encourage group work and discussion. The students end up putting a great deal of effort into finding the answers so they become a learning process for all. The only time I've known them to backfire is when one or two students do not participate in the group work to answer the questions and try to poach all the answers off everyone else without putting any work into the test answers themselves. Other students seem to pick up on the students who do this pretty rapidly after one test though. We had someone doing this in one of my medical coding classes a few years ago. A bunch of us had complained about this student to the instructor a number of times and nothing was done about her. She never studied and depended on poaching answers from others to pass these take home tests. Someone took things into their own hands. Someone, or maybe it was more than one someones, deliberately gave her a whole bunch of incorrect answers so that she flunked the last test before our final exam, and flunked it big time. No one admitted to it and the student wasn't going to admit that she copied these answers from anyone. I always wondered if she even knew who she got the wrong answers from. I was ticked at her by the end of the course because we had a major computer project due which I completed early and stupidly showed to another student who she tricked into discussing and pumping for the project solution and then totally stole my ideas for the chart concept design after I had been careful to make sure she had never seen it. Unlike nursing, there is no licensing exam for health information management after you graduate from school which is why I was so aggravated with the instructors for not being more watchful of students like this who cheated and borrowed other people's work.
Huh guess we do take home tests different. We are supposed to do them alone, not in a group. I like the idea though. They are generally a lot harder and make you dig more and earn more
YOU WILL MAKE IT.iT IS LIFE THAT SOME LIMY AND DISGUSTING PEOPLE SLIP THROUGH THE CRACKS AND MAKE IT NOT ON THIER OWN MERIT.Do not let this consume you ,pray for this student because she needs it, cheating in class is one thing but boards is another.Stay up
:angryfire We have a "Jan" in our class 2 & no 1 snitched bcuz we knew the truth would catch her & it did :smile So don't We are at the end & now in clinicals our instructor sees she doesn't know :barf It's true :laugh:now later... The truth ALWAYS comes to light... Do you... don't worry about her!!
She will NEVER pass the NCLEX. Also,this has to show up in clinicals! Sooner or later, she will have spent all her time trying to get into the nursing profession and find the door slammed shut in her face. You can't cheat on the NCLEX. You either know it or not.
We are at the end & now in clinicals our instructor sees she doesn't know :barf It's true :laugh:now 
Lovely_RN, MSN
1,122 Posts
Jan will probably end up on the NCLEX forum someday crying about how she was the top student in her class and yet it's her 9th or 10th time taking the NCLEX and she just can't understand why?