Most Helpful Customer Reviews
72 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great, basically what you need, August 11, 2010
This review is from: Mosby's Review for the Pharmacy Technician Certification Examination, 2e (Paperback)
This is basically what you need to review for the exam. It's not ALL you need, however.
If you have no previous pharmacy experience:
1. Read an actual text, such as The Pharmacy Technician by Perspective Press
2. Then use a review book, such as Mosby's Review for the Pharmacy Technician
If you have the general gist of pharmacy, the CD that comes with this book is pretty much all you need. The CD contains flashcards, a study mode, and an exam mode for you to practice reviewing and testing in a format similar to the real test.
If you don't know what to study:
1. Calculations and conversions (flow rates, alligations, dosages, etc.--know these solidly)
2. Drug regulation laws/agencies (HIPAA, DEA forms, FDA, etc.)
By taking practice tests, you will pick up on random tidbits of information and begin to recognize drug names. Take a lot, because there were questions on the actual test I had seen before. As for the Top 200 drugs, you don't know which ones will be asked on the test, so just guess on these or familiarize yourself with a few.
Overall, I recommend these 2 books for anyone who wants to take the PTCB Exam:
1. The Pharmacy Technician by Perspective Press
2. Mosby's Review for the Pharmacy Technician
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book To Study With, But Still Some Shortcomings, July 16, 2010
This review is from: Mosby's Review for the Pharmacy Technician Certification Examination, 2e (Paperback)
I bought this book after taking a class at a career college for a year, and seeing a copy of it on my pharmacy tech program director's desk. This book is also sold in Barnes and Noble, but I would recommend getting it off Amazon as it is much cheaper! Anyways, on to the review. I wasn't sure what to think of this book when I first got it. There just seemed to be so much information in there, that at times it was hard to know where to start. (Let me also just say that I took the ExCPT exam, not the PTCB as my state will recognize either one, and the ExCPT exam was cheaper and you got your results back right away, go to www.nationaltechexam.org for more info) So I started reading through the chapters one at a time. The book is split up into three sections, each focusing on a different area of the test, with Chapter review questions at the end of each Chapter. The book also contains seven practice exams, and comes with a CD-ROM that has ten more practice exams on it. I would suggest studying everything. I also liked that the practice test format was the same as on the national test, in other words there were 100 multiple choice questions on the practice tests, and 100 on the national test. I also found it helpful that on the CD-ROM there were over 600 flash cards covering brand/generic name drugs, abbreviations, supplement and vitamin information etc. Also the CD-ROM practice tests are good because there are two ways to study. You can either study by taking a timed practice test, which gives you an hour to complete the 100 questions, and you wait till the end of the test to get your feedback, or you can take an untimed test with 100 questions and get immediate feeback on whether your answer was right or wrong, as well as the rationale for why. This book covers everything you need to pass either exam, as long as you study. I also liked that the book itself had an entire section devoted to nothing but pharmacy calculations, as I thought this and the brand/generic name drugs were my weakest areas. It doesn't have the best explanations for how to solve the math problems, so I would probably get another book for that, such as the one used at my school, Calculations: The Pharmacy Technician Series as this other book is very well laid out and explains things in a logical manner. If you don't know how to convert from farenheight to celsius or your metric to household conversions and things like that before you buy the Mosby's book, then it won't help you much. I found the actual practice problems in this Mosby's book to be harder than the ones I got on the national test. The only reason for giving Mosby's four stars instead of five was because the way to solve the math problems was not explained well enough. I took my national test and passed on the first try, so if I can do it, anyone can do it. Overall, an excellent study guide. I studied during a three week break from classes, and still passed on the first attempt.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good, but a few errors, August 15, 2009
This review is from: Mosby's Review for the Pharmacy Technician Certification Examination, 2e (Paperback)
I took a class at the local college before using this book to go over some practice tests and I have noticed that on a few questions the answers given by the answer key were incorrect. I thought that I was wrong at first, but I brought it to my teacher's attention and she actually agreed that the answer key was incorrect. On one question I found a digit of a number missing on the correct answer, so there was no correct answer choice available and on another one the definition for qid was left out of the possible answer, so again there was no correct answer to choose from. Those are just minor thing I found, but I began to wonder if all the answers on drug names etc were correct. I have no way of finding out until I actually work in a pharmacy for a while. I like the CDrom that comes with it... but again, I have found some errors on it regarding feedback on answers. Eg, it rated my answer as incorrect, but the explanation showed my choice of answer correct. I would still recommend the book, but I would double check answers if you are unsure about the answer key. At the price you pays for it, I expected it to be proof-read and double checked. Overall, it's good practice and you should get enough out of it to pass the PTCE.
Update: If I would take away another star I would do so... I've studied a lot more over the last week and have encountered some more "proof-reading" errors. Now, this tool is making me more insecure about my knowledge.
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