I can attest to the fact that a LOT of the nursing curriculum involves rote memorization. Its easy to fail if you just dont have the time or focus to read 30+ dense pages of medical text and identify the right information to spend time formatting into something easy to memorize.
Critical thinking does come into play though clinicals, labs, etc. But honestly, most of the people I know who failed choked on the chapter tests that are basically just measuring how much information you can cram into your brain weekly. So yeah, people with good study habits but terrible critical thinking do squeeze though sometimes.
Another phenomenon I noticed that pertains more to Robyn, was that the instructors actively test your humility and grit. For example, if you make a mistake in lab or clinical, an instructor might summon you to their office to personally lecture you on your insufficiency and assign additional projects for “remediation”. Talking to other nurses from different programs, this seems pretty common. If you can’t own up to your own mistakes, even when the punishments seems disproportionate, you won’t make it. I would LOVE to have insight into what her instructors thought of her.