The overall achievement gap between CEGEP students and university students in the last Order of Nurses of Quebec (OIIQ) exam reached 20 percentage points, while it had been since March 2019 from 0 to 9 percentage points.
Data obtained by The Press with the OIIQ show that more students from colleges failed their admission test in September 2022 than their counterparts from Quebec universities. But above all that the gap between the two categories of students has particularly widened.
According to the president of the Association of Teachers of Nursing Care of Quebec Colleges (AEESICQ), Marlène McNicoll, these data are “hard to understand”. “It brings up a lot of questions. We hope to have more answers soon,” she said.
September 2022 exam
Total number of admission exam failures: 1587
People with a DEC: 977
People with a baccalaureate: 172
People trained outside Quebec: 366
People trained in the refresher program offered to nursing assistants: 72
Luc Mathieu, president of the OIIQ, insists that the September exam “has not changed” and that it has had “the same structure, the same nature” since 2018. Mr. Mathieu still claims that it is the pandemic which played a significant role in the historically low performance of this cohort of students, who began their studies in the fall of 2019. “Internships have been canceled. Some [infirmières] vaccinated for a very long time… We saw this week that the pandemic had an impact on results in French in secondary school. It’s the same here,” he said.
Mme McNicoll doubts that the pandemic is solely responsible for these discrepancies. Especially since “the pandemic has affected CEGEP and university students in the same way”. Mme McNicoll says college teachers “would like to have more information on what the College uses to assess the minimum competencies of a novice nurse.”
To pass a message ?
The pass rate for the September 2022 entry-to-practice nursing exam has been historically low. Only 51% of all candidates who applied for the first time were successful, compared to 71% in March 2022 and 81% in September 2021. Among graduate students in Quebec, the success rate was only 56% in September 2022 compared to 76% in March 2022 and 82% in March 2021. Candidates for the practice of the nursing profession [CEPI] have three chances to pass the exam.
Faced with such a failure rate, an investigation by the commissioner for admission to professions, Me André Gariépy, was launched last November to shed light on the issue.
In Quebec, you can practice as a nurse after completing a college education or obtaining a bachelor’s degree at university. For years, the OIIQ has been asking that the baccalaureate be made compulsory.
Since the announcement of the disastrous results of September 2022, some have wondered if the Order did not want, with this exam, to “send a message” by making it more difficult for CEGEP students, explains Frédéric Lapierre-Justin, Nursing and cardiorespiratory care personnel representative at the FSSS-CSN.
“Several candidates left the exam not having understood anything of what had happened […]. There should be some soul-searching about the methodological flaws in the exam,” says Lapierre-Justin.
According to Luc Mathieu, it is “archi-false” to claim that the OIIQ wanted to make the exam more difficult for CEGEP students. He claims that the exam is “based on the knowledge taught in college”. “Our goal is for our novice nurses to practice independently,” he says.
Spokesperson for the Alliance for the Future of Nursing Care of Quebec, William Tessier indicates that elsewhere in Canada and the United States, the results of the exams for admission to the nursing profession have also been weak this year. The Alliance, made up in particular of 17 nursing associations and the OIIQ, supports the proposal to make the baccalaureate compulsory in Quebec. The most important thing, “is to have competent nurses who are ready to deal with increasingly complex patients,” he says.
March exam optional
In a progress report published on January 18, Commissioner Gariépy recommended postponing the March 2023 admission exam until the autopsy of the September fiasco was carried out. Me Gariépy indicated that his work carried out so far revealed “worrying elements both on the examination and on the training of candidates”.
On Wednesday, the OIIQ announced that it would not postpone the exam for next March. However, students will be able to choose not to register and wait for next September, without a note of failure being added to their file.
The Order will grant a fourth attempt to candidates who had failed their third and final exam in September 2022 and will also restore the right to practice as a CEPI to those who failed the exam last September for a third time. . Mr. Mathieu assures “collaborate with the commissioner”.
On Twitter, the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, welcomed the decision of the OIIQ, which “will promote the success of our future nurses” in “this context of labor shortage”.
With The Canadian Press
Entrance exam to the nursing profession
- 135 multiple choice questions