2008 Woodie Awards
Nursing program focuses on quality, not quantity
Chelsea Growden
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: Front Page
- Page 1 of 2 next >
|
GCCC is approved for a certain amount of students, but some circumstances make it difficult to teach such a large class.
"We've been approved for 40 students," Lenora Cook, director of nursing, said. "We dropped back to 30 students because we didn't have enough instructors."
The number of nursing students has varied from year to year.
"We admitted 30 this year, 25 in the fall of 2005, and in 2004 we had 30 students," Cook, said.
Despite increasing the class size from past years, students are still turned away each year.
"Our applicants have gone down, but we still turn away a lot," Cook said "We had 59 applicants for 2004 and we had 30 slots."
Cook said GCCC doesn't have as large of classes compared to other community colleges because they are concerned with quality not quantity.
"We're probably one of the smaller class size [compared to other community colleges]. Many are increasing because of the nursing shortage. We've increased but we are focused on retention," Cook said. "We increased this year because we changed the structure and we're trying to identify what makes a student successful."
Other issues are taken into consideration when determining the class size.
"It's [student numbers] based on faculty and clinical settings. We can't have more than 10 students to one clinical faculty," Cook said.
Testing for nursing students is done in the computer lab in the Penka building.
"We try to utilize [computerized testing] because state boards is on the computer, so the more comfortable you are the better you'll do," Cook said. "We're very fortunate to have our computer lab."
There are 20 computers in the lab and 25 to 30 students who need to take the tests at the same time.
"We don't have enough computers so we're being creative," Cook said.
Be the first to comment on this story