After six long, miserable years at pharmacy school, I am required to take a New York State Law Exam (MPJE) and the NAPLEX to determine if I really am qualified to give out pills to people like your aging, wrinkly, diabetic mother. I just finished both of these exams a couple of weeks ago and yes I passed them (*yawn*). And before you ask, no I do not have any tips on how to study for the exam. If you failed it, I’m sorry. If you have yet to take it I do have one piece of advice: Focus on the more difficult tasks in life like tying your shoes or bringing food to your mouth.

That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think the law exam was hard. I walked out of there feeling like I could have failed. The kicker is that NABP curves the exam so much that there is no excuse for failing it (unless of course you can’t speak english, but then maybe an english speaking career isn’t right for you…) . This is straight from the NABP:

The minimum acceptable passing score on the MPJE scale is 75. The passing score reported is NOT a percentage value. The score is calculated by first determining the candidate’s ability level on the MPJE and then comparing the candidate’s ability level to the predetermined minimum acceptable ability level established for the MPJE.

What this really means is that no one really knows what it means. What exactly is the “predetermined minimum acceptable ability level”? All I can tell you is that this magic level must be insanely low.

Let me explain. I would like to say that I took studying for New York State pharmacy law very seriously. In fact, I spent several days in a library studying. I could tell you exactly how long every type of record needs to be kept, what forms to use for which DEA function, prescribing privileges for optometrists, narcotic safe construction requirements, and a host of other law minutiae.

But whoever wrote the MPJE for New York didn’t seem to care about all that stuff. Instead I was asked to apply the law to weird situations that would likely never occur in real life. How weird? Here’s a fictional example:

Mrs. Jones’ seeing eye dog becomes rabid and runs into the pharmacy ripping open bottles and spewing saliva everywhere. To whom should you report this incident?

  1. Local law enforcement
  2. FDA
  3. PETA
  4. Board of Pharmacy
  5. Your Mother-in-Law

I’m sure you get the idea. I was well prepared, but of all the questions I received, maybe on only 5% of them was I sure of the answer. How can someone only feel like they got 5% of the questions correct and walk out of the examination with an 87?  Maybe this means that the NABP has very low minimum standards for pharmacists, and after being in the profession for several years let me tell you: that doesn’t surprise me. I know many excellent pharmacists and I would say 99% of my colleagues are very competent at their jobs. But I have seen the bottom of the barrel and the pharmacists down there are so bad that I always had to wonder how they passed their board exams. Now I know how they did it.

I was going to write another post about the NAPLEX exam, but I think my feelings are so similar that I’ll just ditto it here. The one major difference with the NAPLEX is that while there were many tough clinical questions and patient profiles to wade through, as long as you can do basic pharmacy math (think algebra and no pharmacokinetics) you will pass.

Related posts:

  1. NYS Pharmacy Wet Lab Part 1
  2. NYS Pharmacy Wet Lab Part 2