Today I took the first part of the New York State Part III licensure examination (sometimes called the wet lab). There are two parts to the exam – the first is a written portion and the second is a live session where proctors from the NYS board of pharmacy come and watch you make three products in a lab.

As of right now, I think I did fairly well on the written portion and I’m confidant that I passed it – especially after conferring with some of my friends after the exam. There was one tricky math question where we were asked to convert a 15mg/mL q4h dose of morphine to the equivalent dose in mL’s using a different strength (20mg/mL). It seemed pretty straightforward but I did not notice that they requested in the answer in mL’s per day and not mL’s per dose until the third time that I checked my work. Several people that I talked to missed that!

The errors and omissions part of the exam was the part I was dreading the most, but strangely enough it was the easiest part of the exam. One error that I found was a Toradol prescription where everything seemed to match up except the instructions read: “10mg po tid for 10 days”. This exceeded the max duration of 5 days for this drug. I can thank one of my retail preceptors for making sure I had this memorized completely.

There where a couple of old brand names for the medication error section that I did not recognize. For example, Sinequan has not really been used since the 1970’s and on the other side of the spectrum, Nexavar was only approved about 4 years or so ago for liver cancer (and doesn’t do a very good job at it either after looking it up!), but was not actually included in my coursework when during school. So I didn’t get any credit for those questions.

All things considered, it was a lot less stressful than I anticipated. I added up every question that I was not 100% sure about, and assuming I got them all wrong I’d still have an 80% on the exam which is good enough to pass with some wiggle room to spare.

Now the next test is the actual compounding portion!

Related posts:

1. NYS Pharmacy Wet Lab Part 2