A group of English-speaking nursing students has launched a petition against the Quebec Order of Nurses over what they feel were poorly translated final exams.
“Everybody was saying ‘Did you notice that question, what was that?,’" McGill nursing student Gabriela Mizrahi told CTV Montreal. "Why was there that word that doesn't make any sense?”
The nursing students organized the petition following the results of their Sept. 22, 2014 final exams -- claiming their knowledge and critical thinking was impeded by the quality of the translation, which they say was filled with poor grammar and unusual vocabulary.
"It seemed like the exam was not only attempting to evaluate the candidates’ nursing knowledge and practice, but also their decoding abilities," the petition claims.
The qualifying exam is written after a three-year CEGEP program, and 470 English nursing students wrote the test in question.
Quebec Order of Nurses reaction
The order says it's surprised by the complaints because the test is subjected to a fairly thorough translation process.
“It's translated by a recognized translator who is part of an order, then that version is sent to a nurse who compares the French and the English version to make sure there's coherence with the nursing field,” Chantal Lemay of the Quebec Order of Nurses told CTV Montreal.
“Then the version after that is sent to another English nurse who proofreads it again,” Lemay said.
Quebec language laws
The petition acknowledges that Quebec nurses are required to be proficient in French in order to get their licence to practice in Quebec -- part of the province’s Charter of the French Language.
But the students still feel wronged after paying nearly $600 for an exam they feel was biased against students who opted to write the exam in English.
“I felt like I wasn't being given a fair chance an equal opportunity to demonstrate my nursing knowledge, to show I'm competent,” said Mizrahi.
Mizrahi passed, but fellow student Kristina Beliveau didn’t.
The Quebec Order of Nurses has taken the unusual step of meeting with English nursing schools and promises to address the situation. It's not known how long the investigation will take.
“When we receive a petition as we did we take that seriously and we want to look at our procedure and see that we are doing it the right way,” Lemay said.
“The students have suffered emotionally and financially because of this and it's not fair,” Beliveau told CTV Montreal.
The petition had garnered nearly 400 signatures by Friday morning.
