“Is this going to be on the test?”

I was lecturing recently, and the students are frantically writing down notes until a student raises their hand and asks this question. I give an answer indicating that it probably won’t be on the test, but it is good information to know, and what do I see? Everyone putting their pencils down…

I see a lot of nursing students wanting to be spoon fed the information, wanting to do very little work to learn this information. Granted, there is A LOT of information to know, however work needs to be done to incorporate and apply this knowledge into many different settings and scenarios. I don’t see the students going that extra step to apply the knowledge. This scares me as an instructor and as a potential patient.

This is the mind set that no nurse or nursing instructor wants to see. This action tells me that the students that I am teaching are in the wrong mindset. They are not interested in learning all they can to be a great nurse. They are only interested in passing the test, scraping by and being mediocre nurses. So I pose this question to you? Do you want to be taken care of the nurse that tried their hardest to learn as much as they could or those that did as little as they could to just get by?

As a nursing instructor, it makes me cynical as to the new generation of nurses that we are breeding. Will we have a generation of nurses that can acquire the critical thinking skills needed to be a proficient and skilled nurse? Who is to blame for this next generation? Is it our fault as instructors or is it the mindset and work habits of the students?

I don’t want to see the students sitting around during lab practice or in clinicals, not taking every minute to practice their skills or soak up every opportunity to learn something new. I don’t want to see the bored faces of those that think they have practiced enough or say they know how to do it, and then come finals time, show me that they cannot do the skills and just barely pass.

I no longer want to see my nursing students with a sense of entitlement, saying “I paid my tuition, so give me my diploma”. A diploma is not just a piece of paper, it is a symbol of the education you earned. I want to tell my students that they don’t need to know this for the test and for their pencils to keep frantically writing.

I want to be a proud instructor of the students that are graduating. I want to feel safe, that if I were to open my eyes while laying in an ER and see a former student standing over me, that I can lay my head back with the confidence that I will be well taken care of. I don’t want the feeling of worry that the former student would say “that wasn’t on the test” and therefore they didn’t need to know it to take care of me.