Students protest final exam

[cougarnurse]

What a kick! Nursing students protest RCC exam | lohud.com | The Journal News

A pinning ceremony will be held today, marking the beginning of new careers for students graduating from the nursing program at Rockland Community College.

But it's unclear even to many of this year's students exactly how many will receive their class pins or even graduate.

Numerous students in the associate degree program failed the final exam last week in a required class. The test counts as 50 percent of their grade.

"Half the class failed by one or two points," said student Marisa Ruiz, who was leading an effort to have the college re-evaluate the exam.

Ruiz and other students maintain that several questions on the test in pediatric nursing were ambiguous or could have had more than one correct answer.

"It was a real zinger," she said. "The test was very unfair."

She and more than 30 other students who failed the test met with RCC President Cliff Wood late Friday to protest the exam.

"We're not asking for a curve or anything like that," said Ruiz, who got a 74 on the test, one point shy of a passing grade. "We just want them to throw out the bad questions."

The students had another meeting late yesterday with nursing faculty members. Ruiz said 35 students who failed the test attended. There are 54 students in the class.

RCC spokeswoman Zipora Reitman said yesterday that after reviewing the exam, nursing faculty decided to eliminate several of the questions that raised objections.

"A few questions were eliminated that might be ambiguous or subject to different interpretation," Reitman said.

The nursing faculty was rescoring the tests last night, but students might not know until today if they passed or not.

"I'm sure it's very unnerving for the students," Reitman said. "But we have to do this very carefully."

She said the faculty and administrators at the college were working hard to make the process fair.

Ruiz said she was relieved to hear the college is eliminating three questions on the test. Students who still fail will have an opportunity to take it again.

"It's a fair solution," she said. "All we were asking was for the college to be fair. Now they are being very reasonable."

Many of the students taking the class are adults who returned to school to get a nursing degree, one of the few fields where job demand remains strong despite the recession.

The shortage of registered nurses nationwide could reach as high as 500,000 by 2025, according to figures from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. The demand for new nurses is expected to grow by 3 percent annually, the group said.

It's a similar situation in the Lower Hudson Valley, where hospitals and other health-care providers are still scrambling to fill nursing jobs.

As a result, many local nursing schools, including RCC, have seen enrollment surge as students flock to a career where they know they can get jobs despite the poor economy.

Ruiz, 35, who works as a pediatric occupational therapy assistant, said she, like many of her classmates, balanced jobs and other responsibilities with their education in the hopes of becoming nurses.

"We worked so hard," she said. "It's not fair that we could lose it all over one point on a bad test."

[amberdouglas]

Oh the memories of nursing school...how many times did I take a test, and the people that failed immediatly started crying foul about questions that had more than one answer...
Do these people know that ALL of the questions on the NCLEX have more than one right answer, its about picking the most appropiate? The world is not set up for eveyone to win, regardless of what they teach kids in pee-wee sports...who wants to be a patient in a hospiatl with a nurse that got his or her degree becasue they raised a stink about failing and had questions thrown out and their degree handed to them? nursing school is hard, and not everyone passess, and yes even the people that fail by a point or two still fail...