Grades happen.
They are the output of the assignment that was turned in.
I’ve never really been into checking my grades.
When I was in high school and in the first three rounds at a college, I was confident that I would pass. And I never checked them. I would get the paper or exam back, look at the grade marked at the top, most likely an A. I would stuff it in my bag and go to my next period class. And my report care reflected the A and I would continue this.
Fast forward to my ADN program. I would keep on doing this, not investigating the grades or the comments on my papers and exams. While I am not the best in the class, I skated along with an A minus average. And then, in what I think is what started my hesitancy around grades, the head of my program pulled me in to a conference.
The class had been taking computer-based NCLEX preparatory tests. Computer-based because the NCLEX had started doing online testing sometime in the late 1990s. And this was in early 2001. I had gotten the best grade in the class, by far.
And the program head, who everyone was afraid of, wanted to know how I, not the best student in the program, had gotten the best grade in the class. Underneath the conversation was the subtle accusation of cheating, how had I done it?
Still makes me mad 22 years later. I was 24 at the time, just a baby, and this woman who was in a position of power was subtly accusing me of cheating to get the best grade in the exercise. Had cheating been happening and they were investigating? I don’t know. All I knew was that I was working Thursday through Monday evening shift telemetry tech/CNA, class Mondays and Thursdays, and clinical Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Rinse, repeat for the entire two and a half years I was there. And doing my best.
Side note, I’ve been a workaholic for a long time. Ask me about high school when I worked evenings at a department store, three nights a week, and all day Saturdays.
In that moment, I told her that I had always been a strong test taker. And she dropped it.
I graduated a few months later, took the NCLEX for realsies in July, passed in 75 questions, and kept going. I did not return to the school setting for 14 years. When I decided that if I got hurt I had nothing to back me up as an ADN nurse. This led me to get my BSN.
And then the MSN.
And now the PhD program.
But something had changed back in 2001. I developed a distaste for looking at my grades. Okay. I wasn’t in an educational setting anymore. Until 2015, 2017, and 2022.
Where I still find it very difficult to check my grades. These are all online now. And I know there are comments to them that I would find useful. The idea of looking at my grades, and the FEEDBACK, makes me uncomfortable.
But I have to. There is a strict grade policy in the program because that leads to being dropped from the program for anything less than a B-, and that ends at 82 percent. I have two grades that are sitting in two of my classes that I should look at. No matter how uncomfortable it makes me. I may need a gold star for this. Maybe a nap.
Nurses doing what is uncomfortable since 1850.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 