UTICA College Reviews

ACNeel · May 24, 2014

I am in my second semester at the Utica College Accelerated Online Nursing program based in Liverpool. I would not recommend this program to anyone! It is still extremely disorganized and inconsistent. For example, last week they suddenly decided to no longer issue study guides for the exams, some of which cover over 600 pages of material and are very specific in nature. My clinical instructor was going to create a post board to help us with some the OB information and she was told not to do so. The people at the school do not appear to interested in any way, shape for form in helping you succeed. This is a completely self taught program. During the clinicals, you are told to go into a room and do your assessment and perform care with little to no oversight or being showed how do do so. Again, I would not recommend this program.

ZenNurseMode · Jun 11, 2014

Aw damn. I'm finishing up my prerequisites and planning to attend. I'm self reliant anyway so...being self taught is ok with me.

PLS80 · Jun 22, 2014

I'm currently in the program and it's fine. Yes, I'm exhausted all the time from studying and it's new so it has it's flaws, but don't all colleges? My biggest piece of advice would be to understand the program is online and you need to be motivated to do the work. The teachers onsite are amazing. You can even text them if you need help. Some of the online teachers can be a little bit more difficult to get a hold of, but that is only a select few teachers. The strictly online class are relatively easy, but the other classes take up the majority of everyone's time.

Hope this helps!

ZenNurseMode · Jun 25, 2014

It does thanks!!!

LRC581 · Jul 7, 2014

I’m currently in the program now. Don’t be put off by anyone saying the program is horrible. It’s new, and they’re working out the kinks. It certainly can make for added stress at times, but I make it a point to not allow the growing pains of this program to take away from the education I am receiving. The first class to go through graduated back in April, and so far, I believe all of them have passed their NCLEX on the first try. That being said, every class loses some students each semester due to not passing a class, or simply deciding it’s not the right program for them. What you see at graduation are the students who are smart enough to be nurses, and both mentally and physically strong enough to make it through this program in one piece. All classes are co-requisites. If you fail a class, you do not move forward. You repeat only the class you failed for the entire next semester, and then you move forward with your new cohort. You can only do this one time. What I’ve seen is a lot of students who are wildly attracted to the idea of a quick and easy bachelor’s in an online format, only to realize that this is just as hard as any nursing school, if not harder.

This is not your traditional nursing program. This is nursing school at 1000 miles an hour. You have to be organized and motivated in order to succeed. There are no lectures to attend. You are primarily responsible for how you incorporate the material into your brain. If you aren’t able to read from a text, listen to a lecture, look at a powerpoint, and find a way to pass the exam, you will not succeed in this program. Lab and clinical are amazing adjuncts to the learning process, but those credits are pass/fail. You will typically have 2 classes with proctored exams each semester (Foundations/Health assessment in semester 1, Medsurg1/and half-semester split OB/Geriatric in Semester 2, Medsurg2/and half-semester split Psych/Peds in Semester 3, and Advanced Medsurg in semester 4). Those who are able to succeed in this format are excellent students, plain and simple. If, in your first degree, you got low B’s and C’s, you may find yourself really struggling in this program just because nursing school isn’t like anything you’ve ever done. C+ is passing in this program, and chances are, if you got Bs and Cs in your first undergrad, you could be testing to stay in the program every week.

Finally, the program is a lot of self-study with many classes being entirely online. However, you will need to be fairly close by. Semesters 2 and 3 had me on-site in Syracuse or at clinical 4 days a week. Two days of clinical, one proctored exam day, and one lab day. Depending on your schedule, you could have lab and exam on the same day and it could be condensed into 3 days, but you’re not guaranteed any desired schedule as this program grows to incorporate larger cohorts of students. They will try to take your commute length and any childcare arrangements into consideration when assigning lab and clinical day/times, but your work schedule will take a back seat to this program.

If you’re a motivated person who’s up for the challenge, this program can be the perfect fit for you. I hope this was helpful!

ZenNurseMode · Jul 18, 2014

Oh yes!! Thank you.

TPMJB · Aug 19, 2014

Well, I have to add my two cents to this thread.

Utica College is NOT the nursing school you want to attend. Just because it's easy to get in, does not mean it's a good fit. Let me explain:

I started the ASDN program in May of last year. It was a little bit to get used to. The content was by no means "hard", however. They had the ANGEL software that was both ridiculously outdated and terribly maintained. I ignored this and powered through. With a little HTML knowledge, you could make spellcheck actually work (Angel forced your browser to disable it for some reason, and the built in one was broken). They, of course, penalized for spelling mistakes. Not a mistake I made twice.

Anyhow, the program was very disorganized. In the beginning, we had no study guides. This was fine, we just had to truly know our content. Then, in the first semester, it was suspected that a student was cheating. Suddenly, the tests started changing. More and more would be on the exams that didn't actually appear in the textbook, or actually contradicted what was in the textbook. If we brought these up in exam reviews, these questions would be dropped. No harm no foul.

Last semester is when the trouble started. These kinds of questions that were absolutely wrong (according to our textbook) were popping up more frequently. The best part about this was that exam reviews were suddenly no longer available. When we asked a professor that was supposed to give us exam reviews, she kept skirting the issue and finding excuses to not do them. Our forth exam, half the class was given a different exam that was harder, with no real explanation as to why. It just so happens that the people accused of cheating were given that exam.

But since this fourth exam didn't fail those people, they decided for one last trick. They gave us an itemized study guide for the final. Next to each topic was a number of questions, that all added up to 100. The final was out of 100 questions, no room for other topics. When we got to the final, there were questions on kidneys and various other topics that are completely absent from this study guide. The class average was a 72, which is far below passing. Curiously, three people were accused of failing because they failed this exam and got high 90s on the others. When this was brought up, the instructors involved had no hard evidence of them cheating and it became a racial issue that forced 4 of the faculty to step down. Six people were failed in the class, two of which were kicked out of the program because of this. We lost over a third of our cohort. But us six were given a second chance! If we truly knew our content, then we'd be able to score above an 85 on this "blitz exam" with 150 questions. Keep in mind that this exam was originally intended to have the three who "cheated" take it.

The "blitz exam" not only covered content that wasn't actually in our course (readings or lectures), but it also had dozens of spelling errors (to the point where you couldn't read the question), wrong answers selected, and questions where the answer wasn't even selected so it was automatically wrong. I scored the highest of us six with a 71. It was a slaughter. The instructors do not care about your success in the program and actually actively participate in you failing.

This semester, the exams were better. Since I was knocked back a cohort, I got to see what their exams were like. Of course, they didn't have someone accused of cheating, so they didn't pull the same things with exams. I happened to have a clinical instructor for medical-surgical nursing that we all rated abhorrent last semester because she read a book most of the time, texted on her cell phone, or was just generally gone. Turns out the person hiring did not read the reviews before hiring her. We also have a problem getting clinical instructors because Utica doesn't actually tell them what they have to do in terms of grading, assignments, etc. That's a whole separate topic. Anyway, being in one of her clinicals again, she immediately took a dislike to me. I had already taken this clinical, gotten a letter of recommendation, and generally passed with flying colors. Since "the didactic and clinical go together" I was forced to take it again. This instructor harassed me any time she could, yet she never once saw my clinical interactions with patients (Something that's crucial of an instructor). I'd hand her paperwork that was as good or better than last semester, she'd hand me back a failing grade saying I "wasn't safe" despite never being in a room with a patient with me. It got so bad that I was sending two instructors my paperwork to look over before submitting it to this instructor, and she'd fail me just the same. Toward the end of this semester, the two instructors skirted my emails and texts as if they were told not to be involved in my success. My instructor ended up failing me for the clinical that I had already passed in. Brought everything up to the appeals board, and they said I had "insufficient evidence" that I was being discriminated against (they told me I couldn't bring a lot of my evidence to the appeals meeting. Long story). I even brought up that, as per the evaluation criteria, she couldn't actually grade me since she never witnessed what I actually did.

Anyway, long rant. Utica College is NOT somewhere you want to waste $50,000. Stay far away!

ZenNurseMode · Aug 25, 2014

Aw damn...Thanks for the review!

TPMJB · Aug 29, 2014

Aw damn...Thanks for the review!

I feel it's my civic duty to warn others before they waste a TON of money :)

ARC93 · Sep 17, 2014

LRC581 sounds like staff. Swear I heard those words at a recent orientation. DO NOT use this program to obtain your BSN. it is ridiculous! The staff are horrible. No one is in charge of anything & I've never seen the buck get passed more quickly. You have deadlines, as do the staff, but only you are held accountable. They give tests & don't even inform you of your grade.

They switch to canvas & instead of addressing issues within the system they give you paper & pen tests where you wait for days to get your grade, cause that isn't adding to the stress. They schedule your classes for you starting in second semester. Really? Aren't we adults? LRC581 indicates that they try to work around personal concerns (child care & such) but they don't ask about those things when scheduling. & don't even try to work, they don't care how you plan to pay for it.

Financial aid, particularly Kyle, is a nightmare. On their website they had a page regarding all the items included with tuition (scrubs, lab coat, stethoscope, scissors, etc.) when asked about it they never addressed it, just removed that from their website. Program cost is $50k, but everyone's page says $58k?

They make you come in for 10 min, doesn't matter how far you live. The tests are ridiculous, content not even covered in the modules. They said the Kaplan's are to help prepare for finals but the content on them has nothing to do with what you learned in the semester, so how does this help? They have favorites & wow. Are we in high school. Bad sign when the entire senior leadership team is turned over within weeks of each other.

Ive learned more reading the posts here on allnurses.com than I have from any of them. You will be sorry you decided to enter this program. Save yourself the headache & the $$. Lots of schools offer this now, several SUNY institutions and others. Go some place else. Check out this site: American Association of Colleges of Nursing | Accelerated Nursing Programs

Good Luck! (Btw, I'm doing fine in the program, not disgruntled, just observant.)

TPMJB · Sep 17, 2014

LRC581 sounds like staff.

I agree. They always use the excuse "This is a new program!" whenever they do something mind-numbingly wrong. When the error is pointed out, and even if constructive criticism is given on how to fix the problem, not only is this ignored, but the staff member you brought this to now hates you for "criticizing this new program!" For instance, the "paper test" issue described above, mimicked the problems with the system I had at my workplace some years prior. All the computers in the computer lab pull data from the main server. If the server can't keep up with all the requests, because Canvas take A LOT more bandwidth than Angel, then many errors are the result. The server could barely keep up with Angel as it was. I haven't a single doubt in my mind that this is the issue, to which they blamed on a multitude of things (It's the software, it's the website, it's not our fault!)

Of course, something like this should have been thoroughly tested. When I brought this to the attention of the program director, she ignored it, as she has done to most emails (Respond within 24 hours? Why would they follow their policies?)

Again, even if you have no other options, still run as far as you can from this program.

bigbangxo · Sep 17, 2014

I will be writing a much longer review later on. But for now, just wanted to highlight that within a matter of a few months, 4 faculty members (they were not just didactic professors or anything like that, they were actually people running the program) were asked to step down from their positions and no longer have a part in the accelerated program. Now my cohort and others knew why they were asked to step down (mainly because of how they handled issues within the program, by disrespecting students and not providing them the fairness they deserve i.e. by manipulating exams so that certain people received certain questions and targeting certain students based on bias). However, they all tried to make it seem like they found better positions. Thus this clear loss of 4 faculty members again proved how this program is just about racking up the $ and not about hiring proper staff that has genuine intentions to help students succeed in the program and the competence to handle matters appropriately instead of taking devious measures.