Good afternoon. My name is Sylvie Larocque. I'm the director of the School of Nursing at Laurentian University.
Aside from the NCLEX-RN exam, things haven't changed. In the past, 80% to 100% of francophone students at Laurentian University chose to take the national exam in French. Since the NCLEX-RN came along, the opposite is true: 80% to 100% of our students take the exam in English. They say they have no choice. They find it unfair to have to take their program in French for four years, and then feel obliged to study and write the exam in English.
The reason they give is that they don't have access to resources in French. They also hear their colleagues trying to take the exam in French say that the translation isn't well done and that they don't understand the questions. Moreover, they realize that the success rate of those who take the exam in French isn't the best. Their colleagues don't pass when they take the exam in French, but they pass after taking the exam in English. Students know all the statistics, and they choose to take the exam in English.
When I surveyed the students, they told me that they would take the exam in French if they had a choice. They studied in French, in their mother tongue, and they know all the terminology they used for four years in French. In the survey, I also asked students if, now that they knew or felt they had to take the exam in English, they would still have decided to study in French. To this question, 28% said no, and 28% were unsure. This means that more than half of the students questioned the fact that they had studied in French.
New students are now increasingly reluctant to enrol in the program in French. The rate of participation in this program will therefore decrease, which is contrary to the efforts of Health Canada's Official Language Community Development Bureau, in collaboration with the CNFS, to attract more students to our francophone programs and to increase access to nursing services in French.