More than 40 nursing students concerned about high rates of failure on an exit exam met with school officials Monday to hear the Alcorn State University School of Nursing position on the recent tests.

Christopher Cason, director of university relations for ASU, said he and Mary Hill, dean of the nursing school, and department chairmen met with the students.

“It was a good and productive meeting,” Cason said. “The students wanted to know what the next step would be. Their main concern is whether or not they can graduate.”

Students in both the associate degree and bachelor’s degree nursing programs recently took the Health Education Systems Inc. nationally standardized nursing test, with 70 of 91 failing the test on the initial try.

Students are given a second chance to pass the HESI. Their options were to retake the test either on Thursday or on April 30.

Of the 37 students retaking the test Thursday, 16 passed. They will not be given a chance to take the test again, Cason said. “They have only one opportunity for a retake,” he said.

Students who failed the retake did not receive a definite answer about whether they will graduate on May 12, Cason said.

“No decision has been made on graduation,” he said.

“They will look at all the tests after the April 30 retake and make a decision at that time.”

Hill would not comment on the tests or on the Monday meeting, referring to Cason as spokesman.

Efforts to reach Malvin Williams, interim president of ASU, were not successful.

Paula Wiley, 24, of Monterey is in the associate degree program and is among those who did not pass the retake on Thursday. She is frustrated, she said.

“I’ve passed everything. I passed the clinicals and all of the courses. As far as I’m concerned, I’m a nurse,” she said.

“I’ve always wanted to be a nurse. If the numbers were the other way around, with more people passing than failing, I would say that maybe something is wrong with me,” she said.

Cason said the HESI is a long and complex test. “Naturally, there is some anxiety associated with it.”

Alcorn State is among numerous nursing schools throughout the country that use the HESI exam, he said. ASU has required the HESI as an exit exam since Spring 2000.

Alcorn traditionally has reported high percentages of students who passed exit and board exams.

“In terms of academic strictness of preparing students, nothing has changed,” Cason said.

“And in terms of being admitted to the program, it is still a tough admissions process.”

Wiley said she believes there is a fairer way to examine students at the end of the program.

“If we’re going to take an exit exam, it should be made up by teachers who have been teaching us,” she said.

Controversy over the HESI tests also erupted in April 2006, when students protested that the tests, administered over an Internet site, were fraught with malfunctions.

Hill said at the time those problems were cleared with the company. She stood by the importance of the HESI for graduating nurses.

“We are a service profession. We have to be sure our students have demonstrated the requisites of the common skills to be safe, practicing nurses,” she said in April 2006.

The HESI test is a predictor of how well students will do on the National Council for Licensure Examination, she said last year.