Nursing Education & Evaluating of Student Admission, Progression, Graduation Policies and Procedures
Evaluating Student Admission, Progression, and Graduation Policies and Procedures in Nursing Education
Evaluating Student Admission, Progression, and Graduation Policies and Procedures in Nursing Education
Evaluating of Student Admission The evaluation of admission, progression, and graduation (APG) policies and procedures begins with an examination of whether enough qualified students are enrolled. Academic and demographic profiles of prospective students are important to consider. The first consideration is the mission and goals of the institution and school or department.
If diversity is a goal, the selection of students will be different than in schools where high selectivity is a goal. State and private schools may differ in the types of students they wish to attract. Trends in health care provide an important database for defining student enrollment goals. For example, health care reform has opened the market for nurse practitioners to the extent that many schools of nursing have targeted this population.
Once a determination of the nature of the student to be recruited has been made, the methods of recruitment require attention. Marketing methods and materials should be reviewed in terms of access to catchment targets, clarity of the message delivered, and results of the effort. An entry inquiry as to the source of the student’s information about the school is one way to determine the extent to which marketing materials influenced application decisions.
Admission policies should be clearly defined and support program goals. They should be reliable and valid with a goal of preventing unnecessary attrition while graduating students who are well qualified and who will ultimately pass licensing or certification exams. Student profiles are an important way to track trends in the characteristics of students admitted to programs of learning.
Many colleges and universities require entrance examinations related to basic skills, including standardized examinations such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or discipline-specific tests and institutional examinations in mathematics, English, and reading skills. Grade inflation in both secondary and postsecondary schools has rendered transcript review a difficult measure of student ability.
Breckenridge, Wolf, and Roszkowski (2012), found a variety of factors contributed to success in prelicensure students and identified a variety of risk factors. In addition to factors such as GPA, SAT, and grades in science courses, other factors such as income at poverty level and having English as a second language were even more important to academic success and passing the licensing exam.
A relationship between scores on the Test of Essential Academic Skills from Assessment Technologies Institute is also predictive of success (Newton, Smith, Moore, & Magnan, 2007). It may be helpful to use an overall profile of criteria to guide the selection of students with attributes suited to the challenges of current health care delivery systems and who more closely match the diversity of the populations they serve.
Admission policies should be checked for discriminatory elements. One must sort those educational discriminators that ensure a fit between the student and the program of learning, and those that are clearly discriminatory from the perspective of social justice.
For example, it is appropriate to require that students complete any remediation before admission to the program so they will have the basic skills necessary for success, especially if diversity is a goal.
It is not appropriate, and it is illegal to exclude students because of gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, or ethnic origin. Many states are increasing high school requirements with a concurrent shift in college entrance requirements.
Individuals who perform evaluation reviews must keep abreast of these changes to maintain congruence and to determine what remediation programs may be needed for students who graduated from high school before the increased requirements were established.
Plans must be in place to ensure communication of the changes in a timely fashion. Some programs find it useful to complete correlation studies to determine the relationship of admission criteria to such outcome measures as program completion or success on licensing or certification examinations after graduation.
Although this approach does not measure the potential success of those not admitted, it may provide data about criteria that seem to have little relationship to success indicators. Progression must be fair and justifiable, support program goals, and be congruent with institutional standards. For example, are there conditions for progression related to grade point average at the end of each semester?
If a student must drop out of school for any reason, what are the conditions and standards for return? Are they realistic? Are they known to the students? Do they apply equally to all students with exceptions made only in cases that are clearly exceptional? Records of student satisfaction and formal complaints should be used as part of the process of the student dimension evaluation.
An academic appeals process should be in place for students who wish to challenge rulings, and students should know about the process and how to access it. Some form of due process should be in writing and in operation for the review of disputes regarding course grades or progression decisions. Whether these are discipline specific or campus specific is a function of the size and complexity of the institution.
An annual review of appeals and the decision regarding those appeals provides important information for making revisions to policies and processes that are in place or are needed. All stakeholders should participate in appeals reviews. Most programs have an appeals committee composed of both students and faculty with channels for administrative review.
An internal method of review is to survey or interview students who leave the program. An obvious data set is information about why students are leaving. Common reasons include academic difficulties or academic dismissal, financial problems, role conflicts, family pressure, military service, and health issues. An examination of the underlying reasons for leaving often suggests alternatives for intervention that reduces the attrition rate.
These alternatives may relate to student services or specific program issues. Some programs also gather data about antecedent events that may have influenced the potential to complete the program. The extent of data gathered depends on the goals of the review. Data that can be gathered from the student record is not included on the student survey.
With the student’s permission, data obtained from the record may include pre-entrance test scores, grade point average, progression point at the time of withdrawal, specific course grades, and any history of withdrawals and returns.
These data are extensive but can be used to develop a profile of the student who does not complete a program in an attempt to identify element within the control of the school for potential intervention strategies. Including a control group of students who completed the program in the study gives more meaning to the findings by identifying success indicators and allowing for determination of significant differences between the two groups.