| Course | NURS 600 Evaluation Strategies for Nurse Educators (NURS600) |
|---|---|
| Module/Week | 3 |
| Assignment | Written Assignment 2 on Essay Items and Scoring Rubrics |
| Paper type | Written assignment (3+ pages, 3+ references plus textbook and Bible) |
| Length | about 865 words, 3 double-spaced pages plus title page and references. Course guide: three or more pages of body text in current APA, with at least three references apart from the textbook and Scripture |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| Points | 75 |
| School | Liberty University Online |
| Program | MSN |
| Where it sits | Module/Week 3 in Liberty's published NURS 600 course guide; current sections can differ |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for NURS 600 Week 3
Written Assignment 2: An Extended Essay Item on Sepsis Recognition and an Analytic Rubric Built for Consistent Scoring
[Student Name]
School of Nursing, Liberty University
NURS 600: Evaluation Strategies for Nurse Educators
Written Assignment 2
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The course, item and rubric are composites written for a model assignment; follow the prompt your course provides for Written Assignment 2.
Written Assignment 2: An Extended Essay Item on Sepsis Recognition and an Analytic Rubric Built for Consistent Scoring
Why an Essay Item Fits This Outcome
The outcome for this unit of a senior medical-surgical course is that students will recognize early sepsis from patient data and explain a prioritized response. Oermann and Gaberson (2017) describe essay items as best suited to outcomes that require students to organize information, analyze a situation and explain their reasoning, abilities that selected-response items can only sample indirectly. A multiple-choice item can ask which finding is most concerning, but it cannot show whether a student can connect several findings into a pattern and justify a plan. That connection is exactly what nurses must do at the bedside, and it is the reason this outcome is assessed with an extended-response essay.
The item uses data from a simulated electronic health record, because that is where nurses actually find the cues, and it is written to make students show the kind of thinking that faculty often find hardest to assess. In a multistate survey of 126 baccalaureate nurse educators, Pence et al. (2026) asked 126 faculty how ready they were to teach and judge the thinking the newest licensure exam measures, and only about one in four answered with confidence, while roughly one in three admitted they were largely unready. An essay that asks students to notice cues, interpret them, choose actions and explain them gives faculty a written record of that judgment to evaluate, which is far easier to score consistently than an impression formed on a clinical day.
The Essay Item
Students receive the following case and question during a timed exam, with 30 minutes allowed.
A 72-year-old patient is on day two after a bowel resection. The electronic record shows these vital sign trends from 0800 to 1600: temperature 37.4 to 38.6 degrees Celsius, heart rate 88 to 118, respiratory rate 16 to 24, blood pressure 128/76 to 102/58, and oxygen saturation 96% to 93% on room air. Urine output over the last eight hours totals 160 mL. The patient's daughter reports that the patient "is not making sense." Morning laboratory results show a lactate of 2.6 mmol/L and white cells at 14.8 thousand per microliter, which was not reviewed.
In an essay of 300 to 400 words, (a) identify the findings that concern you and explain how they relate to one another, (b) state the problem you suspect and why, (c) describe your three highest-priority nursing actions in order with your reasons, and (d) explain how you would communicate the situation to the provider.
Telling students the parts of a complete answer does not give the answer away; it ensures the essay measures their reasoning rather than their guess about what the instructor wants.
The Analytic Rubric
Oermann and Gaberson (2017) describe analytic scoring as rating separate components of a response, which gives more specific feedback and usually more consistent scores than a single overall impression. The rubric below scores four criteria, each worth up to 5 points, for a total of 20.
| Criterion | 5 points | 3 points | 1 point | 0 points |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Recognizing and connecting cues | Identifies fever, tachycardia, tachypnea, falling blood pressure, low urine output, confusion and elevated lactate and explains how they form a pattern | Identifies most cues but treats them as separate problems | Identifies two or three cues with no connection | Misses the deterioration |
| Forming a hypothesis | Names sepsis or septic shock risk with reasoning tied to the surgical history and data | Names infection without explaining severity | Names an unrelated problem with partial support | No hypothesis |
| Prioritizing actions | Lists three appropriate actions in safe order, such as rapid assessment and escalation, fluids and cultures as ordered, and close monitoring, with reasons | Appropriate actions in a less safe order or with weak reasons | One appropriate action | Unsafe or no actions |
| Communicating with the provider | Uses a structured format such as SBAR with key data and a clear request | Communicates key data without a clear request | Vague communication | No communication plan |
Practices for Consistent Scoring
A rubric alone does not guarantee consistent scores, and recent evidence shows how much human raters can vary. When 33 faculty in the study by Simms et al. (2026) applied one structured rubric to sample exam questions, their individual ratings agreed poorly with one another, who matched expert classifications less than half the time, while artificial intelligence configurations applying the same rubric were more consistent. Although that study concerned rating test items rather than scoring essays, it is a warning that faculty applying a rubric can still disagree widely. Del Prato and Bankert (2021), mapping the literature on inflated grades in nursing programs, point in the same direction: sharper rubrics, checks on agreement between graders and better-prepared faculty were among the remedies they identified.
Five practices follow from this evidence and from the textbook. First, essays are scored anonymously, with names replaced by numbers, so that a faculty member's impression of a student does not influence the score. Second, each faculty member scores one criterion across all essays before moving to the next, which keeps the standard steady and prevents a strong first section from inflating the rest. Third, before scoring begins, the course faculty score three sample essays independently, lay their scores side by side and talk through every gap until all three read the rubric the same way. Fourth, a second faculty member scores a random 20% of essays, and if the two scores differ by more than 2 points on the 20-point scale, a third reader resolves the difference. Fifth, scores and rubric comments are returned to students within a week, so the essay serves formative as well as summative purposes.
Fairness and Integrity in Scoring
Scoring essays fairly takes more time than scoring multiple-choice items, and it is tempting to skim. But each essay represents a student's attempt to show how they think, and that attempt deserves careful reading. Colossians 3:23 directs believers to work "heartily, as for the Lord" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016), a reminder that the hundredth essay deserves the same attention as the first. Consistent, transparent scoring is one way nurse educators honor both their students and the patients those students will serve. It also makes the essay useful to the student, because rubric comments tied to each criterion show exactly which part of the reasoning needs work before the next clinical rotation.
References
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
Simms, R. C., Hensel, D., Cavanaugh, R., Fox, A., & Kumar, A. (2026). Human vs AI in NCLEX-style item review: Reliability, agreement, and efficiency using the NEIA rubric. Nurse Education in Practice, 94, Article 104897. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2026.104897
What the NURS 600 Week 3 instructions ask
Written Assignment 2 keeps the format shared by all five assignments in the course: three or more pages of body text, current APA, and at least three references apart from the Oermann and Gaberson textbook and the Bible. It is due in Module/Week 3, alongside the first discussion forum, during the reading on short-answer and essay items. Essay items are the textbook's main tool for assessing how students organize and explain their thinking, but they are also the hardest to score fairly, so prompts this week typically ask students to write a constructed-response item and a scoring method and to address reliability. The exact task appears in the course shell.
How this NURS 600 Week 3 example is built
The paper begins by explaining why an essay format suits the outcome being measured, recognizing and responding to early sepsis, better than selected-response items. It then presents the essay item with its case data drawn from a simulated electronic record and the response limits students are given. An analytic rubric with four criteria and four performance levels follows, shown as a table, with points for each level. The scoring section describes five practices for consistent scoring, including anonymous scoring, scoring one criterion across all papers at a time, and calibrating faculty with sample answers. Recent studies on rater reliability, grading rigor and educators' readiness to assess judgment support those choices.
NURS 600 Week 3 grading rubric: where the points go
Expect the rubric for this assignment to weigh the essay item itself, the design of the scoring rubric, the explanation of how reliability will be protected, the three or more outside sources and how well they are used, and APA style throughout. Graders look for an item that clearly asks for higher-level thinking and tells students what a complete answer requires. The rubric earns credit when its criteria match the item, its levels are described in observable terms, and its points add up. Discussion of reliability should go beyond saying a rubric will be used and explain specific scoring practices, ideally supported by evidence about rater consistency.
NURS 600 Week 3 help: mistakes that cost points
The most common problems with this assignment are essay items so broad that any answer could be defended, rubrics whose levels are separated only by words like "good" and "excellent," and points that do not total correctly. Some students forget to tell students the expected length or the elements of a full answer. Others describe reliability in general terms without saying how faculty will be calibrated or how bias from handwriting, names or earlier answers will be reduced. Write a focused item, describe each rubric level in terms of what the answer contains, total the points, and name concrete scoring procedures supported by recent evidence, such as calibration sessions and independent second readers.
Related NURS 600 sample papers
Other NURS 600 weeks
- NURS 600 Week 1: Reflection Paper 1
- NURS 600 Week 2: Written Assignment 1
- NURS 600 Week 4: Written Assignment 3
- NURS 600 Week 5: Written Assignment 4
- NURS 600 Week 6: Philosophy of Clinical Evaluation
- NURS 600 Week 7: Written Assignment 5
- NURS 600 Week 8: Reflection Paper 2
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NURS 600 Week 3 questions, answered
What is NURS 600 Written Assignment 2?
Worth 75 points in Module/Week 3, it is the second of five written assignments, often focused on writing an essay or short-answer item and a scoring method, three pages or more in APA with three outside references.
Where can I find a free NURS 600 Week 3 sample paper?
The NURS 600 Week 3 assignment with an essay item on sepsis, its analytic rubric and the scoring procedures, plus references and grading notes, can be studied here in full.
What is the difference between holistic and analytic rubrics?
A holistic rubric gives one overall score based on a general impression, while an analytic rubric scores separate criteria, such as data interpretation and priorities, and adds them, giving more specific feedback.
How can nurse educators score essays more reliably?
Use a detailed rubric, score anonymously, grade one question or criterion across all papers before moving on, calibrate with sample answers, and have a second reader score a sample of papers.
When should an essay item be used instead of multiple choice?
When the outcome requires students to organize, explain or justify their thinking, such as interpreting a patient situation and defending priorities, which selected-response items cannot fully capture.
Use it as a model, or ask for your own
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