NSG/397 Professional Nursing Role sample papers, week by week

Reviewed by Lenora Whitcombe, MSN, RN · Professional Nursing Role · University of Phoenix · Free custom samples in 24–48h

NSG/397 is where an experienced RN puts the professional role into words: scope, standards, and the difference a BSN makes at the bedside. Our samples show how that argument reads when it stays concrete.

Send the exact assignment or rubric from your classroom and a custom sample written to it lands in 24 to 48 hours, the first one free. NSG/397 is Phoenix’s Professional Nursing Role course. It centers on the move from doing the work well to owning it professionally, with scope, standards, and accountability naming what that means. Searches like "nsg/397 week 4 assignment example", "NSG397 sample paper", and "NSG/397 week samples" land on this page.

What NSG/397 is really about

Most people meet NSG/397 early in the Phoenix BSN, often as the first nursing course after the general education block clears. The room is full of working RNs, many with a decade on a floor, and the course asks them to describe in writing what they already do by instinct. That is harder than it sounds. Five weeks is a short run, and Phoenix labels them Wk 1 through Wk 5, so the reading, the discussion posts, and the written assignment all land inside the same seven days. Sections vary, but the arc usually moves from personal role history toward the standards and codes that define the role for everyone.

What trips people up is the register. Floor talk is fast and shorthand; a role paper wants full sentences that connect an action to a standard, and a rubric that rewards support wants a citation behind each claim. A nurse who writes 'I advocate for my patients' gets a middling letter grade. A nurse who names the advocacy, ties it to a provision of the code, and shows one shift where it changed a plan of care gets read as a professional writer. Our NSG/397 samples are built to show that difference on the page, paragraph by paragraph, so you can see where your own draft goes vague and fix it before you submit.

What NSG/397’s assessments ask for

Across the five weeks the written work in most sections asks for a few recognizable moves. You describe your own practice in specific terms, then measure it against an external frame: a scope of practice statement, a professional code, a standards document from a nursing body. Discussion posts want the same discipline in miniature, a claim plus a reason plus a source, and they want replies that add something rather than agree. Somewhere in the run there is usually a piece on how the BSN changes the role, which rewards honesty about what you could not do before. If your section runs a learning team, expect a shared deliverable where the writing has to sound like one voice, not four stapled together.

Where students lose points in NSG/397

Points go missing here for one reason more than any other, and it has nothing to do with nursing. People carry a sixteen-week habit into a five-week course. They skim Wk 1, treat Wk 2 as warm-up, open the big written assignment on the night it is due, and hand in a first draft with no second pass. In a long term that draft still has a rescue window. Here there is none: the course ends, the letter grade posts, and the section closes. The tell is visible in the writing itself. Paragraphs that start strong and thin out by page three, a reference list assembled in one sitting, a conclusion that restates the introduction because there was no time to think past it.

NSG/397 grading scale at University of Phoenix: how the work is graded, from Phoenix Assignments
How University of Phoenix grades NSG/397, visualized by Phoenix Assignments.

The NSG/397 drawers

Wk 1

NSG/397 Wk 1 assignment example

Sections often open with a personal practice history and the first discussion set on role identity. Full sample paper, annotated: Personal Practice History and Professional Role Identity.

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Wk 2

NSG/397 Wk 2 assignment example

Scope of practice and the professional code typically enter here, usually as short applied writing. Full sample paper, annotated: Scope of Practice and the Professional Code.

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Wk 3

NSG/397 Wk 3 assignment example

Many sections turn to standards documents and how they govern one nurse on one floor. Full sample paper, annotated: Professional Standards in Practice.

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Wk 4

NSG/397 Wk 4 assignment example

Week four often widens to interprofessional work, delegation, and the accountability that comes with it. Full sample paper, annotated: Interprofessional Practice, Delegation, and Accountability.

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Wk 5

NSG/397 Wk 5 assignment example

The closing week usually carries the larger role paper and a forward look at BSN practice. Full sample paper, annotated: Professional Nursing Role Paper.

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Different?

Your classroom shows something else?

University of Phoenix revises courses; week counts and deliverables shift between terms. Send what your classroom shows and the desk matches it exactly.

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Using a NSG/397 sample the right way

Read a sample before you write, not after. Take the NSG/397 piece that matches the week you are in, follow how the argument is built, then close it and draft your own from your own floor. That is the honest use, and it is the one that survives a plagiarism check and your own conscience. If nothing on the shelf lines up with what your instructor actually posted, send us the instructions and the rubric and we will write a custom sample against them. The first one is free and it comes back in 24-48h.

How these samples are written

The discipline behind every paper here: instructions are the outline, worksheets get filled exactly, decks get outlined slide by slide, and the one-course-at-a-time rhythm means your one course gets the whole desk. Send your week's instructions with a request and the sample matches them, revisions included.

NSG/397 questions, answered

How early should I start the Wk 5 paper in a five-week course?

Earlier than feels necessary. In a five-week course the final week usually carries the heaviest written assignment and the least slack, so the outline should exist by the end of week two and the draft by the end of week four. That leaves one pass for evidence and one for sentences, which is usually the difference between a middling letter grade and a strong one.

My role paper says what I believe. Is that enough?

On its own, no. A statement of belief reads as opinion until something external stands behind it: a scope of practice provision, a clause of the professional code, a published standard from a nursing body. Name the source, quote the line that matters, then show the shift where you acted on it. Belief plus evidence is an argument; belief alone is a paragraph a grader can only nod at.

I summarized the code of ethics and lost points anyway. Why?

Because a summary shows you read the document, not that you use it. Graders in this course want the provision applied to a named situation from your own practice: what you did, which line governed it, and what you would do differently now. Two sentences of summary buying three sentences of application is the ratio that reads as competence. Reverse it and the paper reads like a book report.