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<\/a>\u201cThe purpose of bringing in competitive entry is to ensure that students who enter the program will be confident that they have the capacity to be successful in the program,\u201d he says, adding that, currently, approximately one in four nursing students at Camosun drop out before they graduate.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s unfair to let someone invest years of their time and thousands of their dollars in a program that they don\u2019t have a reasonable chance of success at,\u201d he says. \u201cWe think it\u2019s a terrible thing for our students to have to work through years in a program and then be unsuccessful.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Camosun College Student Society (CCSS) say they are worried that the competitive entry process might provide too many barriers for some students, including grade-point average qualifications and an intensive interview process. They are especially concerned about those students who are returning to school after a long absence and those who use English as a second language.<\/p>\n
\u201cCamosun still needs to be fair to all students and give them all equal opportunity, so if they do get through the process and nursing is what they want to do, I think that should be encouraged,\u201d says Mindy Jiang, CCSS student Education Council representative for the Lansdowne campus, \u201ceven if English is not their first language, or they didn\u2019t have the best marks or best experience in high school. It will provide barriers for students because not every student is given the same kind of opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Currently, the goal is to get 160 of the program\u2019s 192 students into the University of Victoria for their last year and a half of the degree program, but this has proven to be quite challenging without competitive entry, says Bishop.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the chair of Camosun\u2019s Education Council, Carly Hall, stresses that the college has developed an \u201ceducational standard around competitive entry\u201d in order to make decisions on what programs the process is appropriate for.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just want to be really clear that there\u2019s not a change to the admissions process at Camosun, that the first-qualified, first-served philosophy still stands, but there have been some changes to how that is defined for certain programs,\u201d says Hall.<\/p>\n
Jiang says the CCSS is worried that once nursing moves to competitive entry, other programs may follow suit, but Hall doesn\u2019t think it will become common practice in admissions at the college.<\/p>\n
\u201cI certainly wouldn\u2019t expect it to become the standard. I think there may be programs where it\u2019s appropriate, but there\u2019s also a lot of programs where it\u2019s maybe not appropriate,\u201d says Hall.<\/p>\n
Bishop says that qualifying students for the nursing program without an interview and consideration of their academic levels had put Camosun at a disadvantage because it was easier for applicants to get into the program, as long as they were willing to wait it out.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many well-qualified applicants who live in Victoria ended up going to schools in other parts of the province because they could get in more quickly,\u201d says Bishop. \u201cAnd, to be blunt, some of the weaker students in the province applied to Camosun because they knew if they sat on the waitlist long enough, they could get in here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bishop says he\u2019s feeling positive about switching his program to the new entry process and believes it will increase the overall quality of Camosun\u2019s nursing program.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we\u2019re trying to do is encourage applicants to the program to come better prepared, and to assess that ability so that the students who enter the program have a very reasonable expectation that they can be successful,\u201d he says. \u201cUltimately, I think we\u2019ll end up with a process that is both more straightforward and fairer to the applicants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bishop says that the college\u2019s next step, after a couple of years of using competitive entry, is to decrease the number of nursing students taken into the program each year. This will provide smaller class sizes and better opportunities for hospital and clinical placements, he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Camosun\u2019s nursing program will be even tougher to get into next year, when the popular and academically rigorous program switches to a new competitive entry process. Final details need to be confirmed at the September 16 meeting of Camosun\u2019s Education Council, and the college\u2019s nursing program will begin assessing and interviewing new applicants at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-september-4-2013"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7475"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7477,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7475\/revisions\/7477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}