The appalling failure rate at the 2016 Professional Nurses State Final Examination is a reflection of poor teaching methodology rather than any deficiency the students may have.
This is according to Public Relations Officer of the Ministry of Public Health Terrence Esseboom. Speaking with Stabroek News on Friday, Esseboom said members of the Ministry of Education team who graded the paper had communicated to the ministry that while the students displayed knowledge of the content tested they were unable to contextualize it.
“According to the officials they performed very poorly on the higher order tasks. Some misinterpreted questions. Some responses to the questions had nothing to do with the questions themselves. They couldn’t do higher order questions which called on them to explain, they couldn’t do that. They seemed accustomed to only being asked to recall,” he said.
According to Esseboom, the ministry has therefore asked for a blueprint of structural and other changes necessary to make sure that these and future nursing students are presented with better more practical education in the field.
Meanwhile, the nearly 150 students who failed the examination remain skeptical about the results. Several students told Stabroek News that the examination itself was “manageable” and included several questions from their mock and intermediary examinations, which they felt comfortable answering.
“These were the same questions from before and I know I answered them well so I need more information. A better explanation as to why I have failed,” one student said.
The students reported that they have not received a pass slip or any clear indication of their grade.
Additionally their requests for a review of their papers have been denied.
“I am willing to pay the $8,000 to have my paper reviewed. I don’t believe I failed. I honestly believe the council is looking to punish us for speaking out after the paper was supposedly leaked,” the student said.
Esseboom confirmed that the students were not being allowed to review their papers.
He claimed that this was because the markers had compiled copious comments on the performance of each student which rendered a review unnecessary.
However, the students have not been provided with these comments or any other information other than a statement of “pass” or “fail” on each paper.
“They just have a broad sheet on which they show you your name and say this column is functional 1 you passed, this column is functional 2 you failed and so on. We have not been told anything else,” a student told Stabroek News.
The student noted that the paper which had the highest failure rate was the Functional Nursing Paper 11. This was not one of the papers rewritten in February of this year but was completed in October 2016.
On February 21, The 150 student nurses who wrote the Multiple Choice aspect of the 2016 State Final Examination for Professional Nurses rewrote that examination.
This rewrite followed a November 2016 decision by the nursing council to render the exam null and void since they had tangible evidence that the tests had been “compromised.”
The nurses objected to this decision asking that the council provide evidence of this compromise. Then Minister of Public Health Dr George Norton, after being approached by the students and consulting with the Chairman of the Nursing Council, the Director of the Division of Health Science Education and the Principal Tutor of the Georgetown Nursing School, decided that the nurses would not be asked to re-sit these examinations “until a proper investigation is completed” into allegations that the examination papers were being sold.
In February Minister of Public Health Volda Lawrence told media operatives that after holding discussions with student representatives and the General Nursing Council an agreement was reached to move forward with a re-sit of the examination.
As part of this agreement the Ministry of Education engaged its personnel on behalf of the Ministry of Public Health to prepare, administer and mark the multiple choice questions.
Lawrence, also explained that Ministry of Education staff would be recruited to mark the essay part of the examinations first written on October 19 and 20, 2016.
The results from both sets of marking were released to nurses on March 10.
These results showed that only 23 of the 179 students who wrote the examination had passed all five papers.
