The outcome of any system of evaluation has a considerable impact on the daily lives of students in a variety of educational settings. Hence, it was attempted to illustrate the complexity of the problem when evaluating the performance skills of first year students in the clinical environment of the general hospital. The choice of the research field originated from the increasing concern of the researcher about the reliability of the current evaluation practices in the formative assessment of first year student nurses. The impression gained is that nurse educators are more concerned with the end results of evaluation than with the teaching-learning process needed to reach this goal. Due to the many variables that can influence its results, the implementation of the evaluation process in clinical nursing is extremely complicated. In the course of studying the literature relevant to the research field, the researcher identified aspects that can be considered as of critical importance in the assessment of student performance in clinical nursing.