NURS 600 Week 1 Reflection Paper 1 on Being Evaluated and Evaluating Others Example

Reflection Paper 1: The Clinical Instructor Who Passed Me and the Student I Almost Passed, a First Reflection on Evaluation

Introduction

I have been evaluated many times as a nurse: in nursing school, in orientation, at every annual review and in a certification exam. Until this course, I had never thought carefully about what makes an evaluation fair, accurate or useful. I am preparing to move into a nurse educator role in a hospital-based residency program, and I will soon be the person deciding whether a new nurse is ready. This reflection examines two experiences that shaped how I think about evaluation: an instructor who passed me when perhaps I should not have passed, and a new graduate I came close to passing when I knew the graduate was not ready. I interpret both experiences through the opening chapters of Oermann and Gaberson (2017), widen them with recent research, and end with the questions I hope this course will help me answer.

Being Passed

In my second clinical rotation, on a busy surgical unit with an instructor responsible for eight students, I struggled with time management and with calculating IV medication rates under pressure. Twice my instructor caught a calculation error before I gave a medication. At midterm, I expected to be told I was at risk. Instead, I received a satisfactory evaluation with a comment that I was "improving." I passed the rotation. At the time I was relieved, and I told myself that the instructor had seen something in me that the errors did not show. I never asked what "improving" meant or what I should practice, and nobody told me. Two years later, as a new graduate, I made a similar calculation error with a heparin infusion that a pharmacist caught, and I realized that the weakness my instructor had seen had never been addressed.

Oermann and Gaberson (2017) distinguish formative evaluation, which provides feedback during learning so that students can improve, from summative evaluation, which judges achievement at the end. Looking back, my instructor blurred the two. The instructor gave me neither the clear formative feedback that would have pushed me to practice calculations nor an honest summative judgment. That kindness felt supportive, but it denied me the information I needed.

Almost Passing Someone Else

Five years later, I was precepting a new graduate on our telemetry unit. The graduate was warm with patients and well liked by the staff, but repeatedly missed changes in heart rhythm and did not escalate concerns. At the end of orientation, I was asked whether this nurse was ready to work independently. I began writing "ready with continued support," because I liked this nurse, because the effort was obvious, and because I hated the thought of being the reason a hardworking colleague lost a first nursing job. I stopped only when a colleague asked me whether I would want this nurse caring for my father on a night when I was not there. I wrote an honest evaluation, and the orientation was extended with a focused plan. Six weeks later the new nurse was safe and confident. I came close to repeating my instructor's kindness, which would have been a failure of my duty to that nurse and to every patient in that nurse's care.

What Research Says About These Experiences

My experiences are not unusual. In a scoping review of 12 studies on grading in nursing education, Del Prato and Bankert (2021) found that grade inflation is linked to institutional constraints, external standards, team teaching, a lack of faculty confidence and student incivility. They proposed clear grading expectations, precise rubrics, valid and reliable examinations, attention to interrater reliability and faculty development as ways to reduce it. Several of those factors, especially a lack of confidence in my own judgment, were present when I nearly passed my orientee.

The specific problem of passing students who do not meet standards in clinical settings has a name, failure to fail. Adkins and Aucoin (2022) surveyed 327 prelicensure clinical faculty about the factors that affect such decisions, using a tool built on the idea of face-implicating factors, the social discomfort of delivering bad news. Faculty who had passed underperforming students were more affected by these factors than faculty who had not, and the authors found a direct connection between face-implicating factors and the likelihood of passing a student who did not meet the criteria. Reading that study, I recognized my own reasons: not wanting to disappoint someone I liked, and not wanting to be seen as harsh.

Part of what makes fair evaluation difficult is that much of what we evaluate is clinical judgment, which is harder to observe than a skill. In a multistate survey of 126 nurse educators in baccalaureate programs, Pence et al. (2026) found that only 23% felt extremely or very well prepared to teach and assess clinical judgment in line with the Next Generation NCLEX, while 34% felt not so or not at all prepared. If experienced faculty feel unprepared, it is no surprise that my instructor and I both struggled to judge the thinking behind our students' actions.

Students can be part of the solution. Wilgenbusch et al. (2026) adapted the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric for students to rate themselves twice during an academic year and found significant growth in self-assessed clinical judgment. Students with lower course grades also rated themselves lower, which suggests that self-assessment can help students see their own weaknesses. If my orientee and I had used a shared rubric from the first week, those missed escalations might have become a learning goal early rather than a crisis at the end.

Ethical and Spiritual Reflection

Oermann and Gaberson (2017) describe evaluation as carrying ethical obligations: to be fair, to base judgments on evidence, to protect students' rights and to protect the public. The last obligation is the one both my instructor and I nearly forgot. The patients who would someday depend on our students were invisible in the moment of evaluation, but they were the reason it mattered. Scripture speaks to the courage this requires: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 27:6). An honest evaluation can wound, but given in a spirit of care, it is an act of faithfulness. My orientee thanked me months later for the extended orientation. I wish I had been able to thank my instructor for the same honesty.

Questions I Bring to This Course

These experiences leave me with questions I hope this course will help me answer. How do I write clinical evaluation criteria that are specific enough to support a fair decision but flexible enough for different units and patients? How do I separate a student's personality, which I may like or dislike, from the performance I am judging? How can I assess clinical judgment, not only skills, in a way that is valid and consistent across evaluators? And how do I document concerns early enough that a failing evaluation, when it comes, is neither a surprise nor an injustice? I expect the chapters on clinical evaluation and grading to be especially important, because they speak directly to the two experiences in this paper. I also want to learn how to give feedback that a struggling student can actually use, so that a midterm evaluation names the problem, describes what success would look like and sets a date to review progress. My instructor's comment of "improving" did none of those things, and my first draft of the orientee's evaluation did not either.

Conclusion

Being evaluated taught me what it costs a learner when an evaluator chooses comfort over honesty, and evaluating others taught me how strong the pull toward that choice can be. The opening chapters of this course and recent research show that the problem is widespread and that clear criteria, reliable tools, faculty development and student self-assessment can help. I begin this course, and the new role that follows it, determined to become an educator whose evaluations are fair, evidence-based and honest, because that is what students and their future patients deserve.

References

Adkins, D. A., & Aucoin, J. W. (2022). Failure to fail: Factors affecting faculty decisions to pass underperforming nursing students in the clinical setting: A quantitative study. Nurse Education in Practice, 58, Article 103259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2021.103259

Del Prato, D. M., & Bankert, E. G. (2021). Academic grade inflation in nursing education: A scoping review of the qualitative and quantitative literature. Nursing Education Perspectives, 42(1), 11-16. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000000723

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Oermann, M. H., & Gaberson, K. B. (2017). Evaluation and testing in nursing education (5th ed.). Springer Publishing Company.

Pence, P. L., Brodersen, L. D., Chung, S. Y., Moran, V., & Kim, M. J. (2026). Study of nurse educators' preparedness to teach and assess clinical judgment in alignment with the Next-Generation NCLEX. Nurse Educator, 51(1), E78-E83. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000002024

Wilgenbusch, B. A., Jurevic, V. D., Gilb, K. E., Jeanmougin, C. E., Zehler, A. R., Cole, B. S., & Osborne, J. (2026). Adapting the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric for student self-assessment. The Journal of Nursing Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20260227-05