MMSc Nursing Entrance Exams — admission to full-time and part-time programmes at medical university

Introduction. Reliable selection of candidates is a prerequisite for Master’s degree graduates to achieve professional success on higher levels of nursing management in the future.

Aim of the study. Comparative analysis of candidates with reference to their scores on the admission test conducted at the Medical University of Warsaw (MUW) between 2009 and 2012 by the preferred mode of the Master’s degree programme in Nursing.

Material and methods. A retrospective study involving a total of 1960 candidates for a Master’s degree programme at the MUW, including 1157 candidates willing to take a full-time course (FT group) and 803 candidates for a part-time course (PT group). Results. Reliability of admission tests was relatively low and alpha ranged between 0.429 and 0.558. It was demonstrated that the index of test difficulty was lower in all years in the case of the PT candidates compared to the FT candidates. The mean score on the entrance exam was also higher among the FT group compared to the PT group (ANOVA test, p < 0.000001). Significantly higher scores among the FT group compared to the PT group were observed in all years of the study (post-hoc RIR Tukey test, p< 0.01).

Conclusions. Candidates for a full-time programme were better prepared for a Master’s degree course compared to those applying to a part-time programme. There is a need for a deep analysis (including also individual conditioning) of difficulties encountered by the PT candidates in sufficient mastering of clinical issues.

Nursing Topics 2014; 22 (4): 477–483