I've been teaching for 15 years. Not sure how long I can continue. The students are becoming more disrepectful every year. They are less motivated and are totally unprepared when out of high school.the worst thing is they are buying our test banks and cheating! Our administration is only interested in "numbers" of those that successfully get through our program and not rocking the boat, since cheating cannot be proven. When I write my own questions, students get 70's -80's on the exam. When I use test bank questions, high 90's-100's!
I'm a nurse first, worked in acute care for 30 years, and an educator second. I have a hard time putting unetithical people out in the community.
i know this problem is not unique to our school. Any thoughts/ suggestions would be appreciated. I look forward to retirement soon so hate to change jobs this late in my career. Frustrated.
I am a third-semester nursing student who has been using test banks since my first semester in the program. You could say that I discovered the existence of test banks by accident, but ever since I began using them, I have scored nearly 100 on every test I have taken. But here is the catch -- my teachers don't use questions from just one test bank.
While it seems you have put a lot of effort into studying, and exposing yourself to as many different questions as you can, you're still cheating, in a sense. You don't know which of the bank questions will appear, but the fact that you are accessing a bank that is not meant for public (student) viewing, this is where the problem lies.
While it seems you have put a lot of effort into studying, and exposing yourself to as many different questions as you can, you're still cheating, in a sense. You don't know which of the bank questions will appear, but the fact that you are accessing a bank that is not meant for public (student) viewing, this is where the problem lies.
I understand where you are coming from. Just for the heck of it, here is a hypothetical question for you -- I don't think that there actually this many student-intended test banks (e.g., Saunders) out there, but let's say that there were 16 or 17 different publishers of such student-intended test banks. Let's say that I read through the equivalent chapter in every book in preparation for my test, and even though I don't see the same word-for-word questions on my test, I see the same concepts tested in the same ways (because there are only a few ways to write the same question). Because of this, I am able to make an A by using resources intended for students, even though I never really had to do any traditional studying. Is this considered cheating? In order to write questions that the students can't "game" ahead of time, wouldn't the instructors have to go out of their way to write intentionally tricky questions on concepts that are never tested?
BTW, the instructor-only test banks are so readily available now (free torrent sites, online stores if you don't mind spending a few bucks) that it seems like instructors would have to start writing their own questions in order to avoid the consequences of students using these resources. Even if someone's simply doing some Google searching on a nursing education-related topic and isn't specifically searching for test banks, they're some of the most prominent search results in all search engines for nursing-related terms.
We had a group of students in which it was suspected that a number of them were doing just that: cheating with the test bank questions.
Our NCLEX pass rate dropped from 98% to 62% because of that group for that one year, then it bounced back up again. Hmmmmm... Seems that reading the questions just to memorize the answers and NOT the content really came back to bite them in the behind.
Cheating is wrong, and a very un-nurse like behavior. However, things tend to right themselves once NCLEX time comes around. The final joke is on the students who cheated.
I am a nursing student. A lot of us are not accustomed to the nursing type questions. I read every single chapter 3 or 4 times and really work hard to make sure I know my material, but what good is that if you can't apply it? I don't only turn to test banks from my assigned books but also to test banks from other books. I try to find as many questions as I can from everywhere not so I can cheat but so that I can learn to apply this knowledge. When you do so, you also see discrepancies and different norms which becomes helpful because when you're in the hospital you these discrepancies. So seeing them before hand and learning those rationales helps. These are practice questions for me and if I see them on a test, how is that my fault? I'm trying to improve my critical thinking. I'm not saying all students are like me, but not all of us use those questions to cheat. They genuinely help me understand and enforce as I learn
I am a nursing student. A lot of us are not accustomed to the nursing type questions. I read every single chapter 3 or 4 times and really work hard to make sure I know my material, but what good is that if you can't apply it? I don't only turn to test banks from my assigned books but also to test banks from other books. I try to find as many questions as I can from everywhere not so I can cheat but so that I can learn to apply this knowledge. When you do so, you also see discrepancies and different norms which becomes helpful because when you're in the hospital you these discrepancies. So seeing them before hand and learning those rationales helps. These are practice questions for me and if I see them on a test, how is that my fault? I'm trying to improve my critical thinking. I'm not saying all students are like me, but not all of us use those questions to cheat. They genuinely help me understand and enforce as I learn
If you're accessing test banks illicitly, material that is not intended for students for studying purposes, you're cheating. It doesn't matter if that's not your intention -- that's like saying, "I didn't take the money to steal it, I just took it because I needed the money." Same end result.
None of us started out in nursing school "accustomed to the nursing type questions." That's kind of the point of being in nursing school. Still not an excuse for cheating.
ReinventingMyselfAgain, MSN, RN
1,953 Posts
While it seems you have put a lot of effort into studying, and exposing yourself to as many different questions as you can, you're still cheating, in a sense. You don't know which of the bank questions will appear, but the fact that you are accessing a bank that is not meant for public (student) viewing, this is where the problem lies.