There is a school reform going on in nursing education in Finland, which emphasizes all qualitative aspects of learning. The purpose of this study was to examine the qualitative evaluation of student performance, with the final examination of nursing education taken as an example. The objective was to develop methods to "measure" the depth of the learning process in nursing education. The data consisted of the students' answers to the final exam questions (N = 418). The answers were those of the surgical and psychiatric nursing students in Finland in 1985. Data was analyzed by the method of discursive content analysis. For describing the cognitive complexity of the knowledge, the concepts of the level of information processing (surface-deep), the form of the knowledge (atomistic-holistic), and the structure of the knowledge (pre-structured--relating) were used. In the students' answers, a tendency towards superficial cognitive learning and the production of fragmentary information without a basic learning idea can be seen.