Sunday, February 28, 2010

MyNursingLab rant

Over the past few weeks, I have been using the book Pharmacology for Nurses, 2nd edition by Adams, Holland & Bostwick.  For $117, this book comes w/ a subscription to a website called My Nursing Lab.

By itself, the subscription to My Nursing Lab costs $75. 



I ran into a problem w/ My Nursing Lab one of the first few times that I used it.  Over time, as I have used it more and more, I have found errors in the pretest and post-test questions.  Mind you, this pre-test and post-test are supposed to be tools to measure your progress.  In theory, you take a pre-test that tells you which parts of the book or which sections you need to review or work on.  Then, you take a post-test which hopefully shows that you learned something. 



Except -- if you find a bunch of errors...you just learn that the thing is not worth the $75 out of the $117 that you paid for it.



OK, so maybe I'm a little harsh -- everybody makes mistakes... everybody has those days (as Hannah Montana says!).   But gee -- if I find a problem w/ several chapters, I think I have a right to be a tad annoyed.  Can you imagine reading a Harry Potter book and finding out that they omitted one of every 5 pages?   How about watching a movie and finding out that they forgot to put the ending in?  Or better yet -- how about getting a house built and finding out that the pipes are missing? How about a teacher teaching you chapter 5 and giving an exam on Chapter 6?  Does that still fall under "everybody makes mistakes"?  How about the DMV failing you on a driving test because they had the wrong answer key? Mistakes? Hmmmmm.

OK, so you be the judge - I am posting the errors for all to see.

Chapter 5 had this as an exercise.  Check out the 3rd question in the series:

??? How did we get 24 as the correct answer?  The correct answer is 18.0 (3 half lives) but the system marks that answer as wrong and it lists the correct answer as 24.0 hrs.    Mindboggling, I know.



And that's not it .  Below is another moment of brilliance. The question isn't even all there. (Saliva isn't an effect, last time I checked!)



And it goes on...


Yet another is error below.  You will see that even though the thing marked my answer incorrectly, the Rationale is exactly the same as my answer and anyone w/ half a brain knows that none of the other anwers make sense.

I know there are more. But these are the ones I've found and so far I am already too mad to worry about the others. I didn't even bother to review anything else.

I want my money back. I really do.
I hope nobody else has to endure this kind of silliness. For $75 they should invest in a proofreader.

No comments:

Post a Comment