Lawrence Memorial Hospital School of Nursing Reviews

"It cost me $10,000 to learn that I picked the wrong school. I found most of the staff to be very nice, totally competent people and they're clearly awesome nurses. But for an educational facility the main instructor and administration left a lot to be desired. I have a BA, I know the difference between a tough class and a bad class. This was a bad class. Have also heard a lot of people say that nursing school can be challenging. This struck me as going a bit beyond that. I found the class to be severely disorganized and unfocused, yet strict and unreasonable. Much of the information came in the form of "here's a haystack, now find the right needles." Nobody is expecting to be spoon-fed the answers, but there needs to be some level of focus and direction. Exam questions were poorly written (many obvious typos and words left out). I was penalized for not including the measurements even though the specific measurement was included in the question. The instructor claimed that this was how ATI does it, which is false. When ATI wants the redundancy it's already placed in the answer for you. (ATI is one of the source materials that are an added cost, so you get to know how ATI works pretty quickly). Acceptable data ranges were changed two days before exams. We were told that the examples used in the exams would be obvious enough to fall outside of the gray area between our different sources of perimeters. That didn't happen, they were right on the border. When I asked for clarification on exam answers I was sometimes told that there was some little known rule (that we didn't cover and was clearly counterintuitive). Ideally the class would have focused on just teaching us what we need to know to do the job of being a nurse. Instead they ran on the idea of coming up with the worst NCLEX-style questions they could think of. This is what your grade is based on. You need to get a 78. We were penalized for not having work done prior to class. There is nothing wrong with homework, but the class materials and instructions were sometimes disorganized, unclear, and/or released late or changed at the last minute. In class we would go over the results of exams and quizzes. When concerns were raised about how questions were worded the students who asked would be singled out and publicly chastised, sometimes using personal information of debatable relevance. We started the semester by being informed that there was a heavy amount of recent turnover and that we'd all be finding our way through together. Still they offered no flexibility even when things were obviously caused by their mistakes. I showed the syllabus to several nurses I work with. They were surprised to see how crammed and all over the place it was. The school kept pushing me to sign up for extra classes even before I got my grade. I kept hearing "we want to see you pass" like it was an unofficial motto. This is probably true, I'm just not sold on the idea that they want you to pass in four semesters. The clinical instructor was great, but you're not given enough training to do what's expected of you. I was encouraged to attend open labs. I was an evening/weekend student. They don't have evening/weekend open lab hours. So yeah, long story short, I wouldn't go here just yet. I know they're rebuilding, but they definitely need time to get there. ."