(Montreal) The day after last fall, the Order of Nurses of Quebec (OIIQ) filed a progress report on its investigation into disproportionate failure rates for admission to the nursing profession exam and announced that it was giving one week to consider the two submissions to respond to recommendations.
Posted at 2:02 p.m
Ugo Giguere The Canadian Press
Will the next nursing entrance examination be postponed? Are the candidates who failed the last disaster test for a third time entitled to one last chance? We still have to wait before knowing the answers to these questions, said the press release published online Thursday afternoon.
In a message published on its Twitter account, the OIIQ says it is aware “that this situation creates uncertainty” for candidates to practice the nursing profession, as well as for educational and healthcare institutions, which are counting on the arrival of reinforcements.
However, the Order estimates that it will need a week to “properly analyze the report and its recommendations” and “explore the various options”. He therefore gave himself until 25 January to send his reply to the Commissioner.
The OIIQ also says it will continue to cooperate fully with the investigation.
In the progress report published on Wednesday, Me André Gariépy claims to have collected “worrying elements both on the examination and on the training of the candidates”. He therefore claims that “during the last test candidates are likely to have suffered prejudice in their career path”.
Last September, 51% of the candidates who tried their luck failed the exam with a 55%.
At the time the results were announced, the OIIQ had blamed the context of the pandemic for justifying an inadequate learning or exam preparation framework for students in the various nursing programs.
Commissioner Gariépy started his investigation with two hypotheses that could explain the impressive error rate. On the one hand, either “the examination has methodological flaws” or, on the other hand, “the training of the candidates […] not adequately prepared”. A combination of the two factors could also play a role.
He therefore proposed a postponement of the next entrance exam scheduled for March and “precautionary measures” for the around 200 candidates who were excluded from the admissions procedure because of a third failure.
According to Mr Gariépy, “it would be unwise to oblige a candidate to come to the next examination session” before we know what went wrong last autumn. For the same reasons, he believes it is unfair to permanently dismiss potentially aggrieved candidates.
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Note to readers: in a previous version we identified the commissioner with the first name “René”, although it is Me André Gariépy.