The CPJE: RESULT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sunday October 8th 2009 Ok, boys and girls, are you sitting comfortably? Good, then I shall begin. I sat the CPJE on September 19th 2009, 6 days after having taken the Naplex. Given the first exam had basically ripped my heart out and made me eat it for breakfast, I wasn't confidant walking in to the CPJE exam, and was amazed that I left feeling so happy with what I had experienced whilst taking the exam. How could it be that everyone was so petrified of the CPJE when it was the Naplex, and I apologize for having to use this perfect expression, that was such a bitch. Lets look at some stats which are available to view in even greater breakdown here. NAPLEX Fail 2.4% Pass 97.6% So, overall, for the Naplex, 97.6% pass the exam! How can that possibly be? That exam was DEVASTATINGLY difficult. The pass mark must be something like 30%! One additional point to note for the Naplex is that the scaled score has a pass mark of 75, but a MAXIMUM ATTAINABLE of 150. Keep that in mind. Here's the overall stats for the CPJE: CPJE Fail 18.4% Pass 81.6% So, overall, 18.4% of people sitting the, apparently easier CPJE exam, 18.4% fail. Hmmm. Well, that means that the pass mark on this easy exam must be waaaaaaaay higher than that for the evil Naplex. Interesting. Ok, now I suggest you all take a 5 minute interlude and read the following: http://www.pharmacy.ca.gov/forms/det_passing_scores.pdf The first thing to note is that the scaled score for the CPJE still gives a passing mark at 75, but has a MAXIMUM ATTAINABLE as 99. Wow! I've read the whole report like 100 times and I still don't really understand what it means, apart from perhaps it is possible to sit an "easy" version of the CPJE and scrape a pass, or get a really difficult version and get a really awesome score, but either way anyone who gets above 75 is deemed worthy of being called a pharmacist. Ok, but would you feel sick if you had the tough questions and did really badly and failed? Who knows. Now, before I get back to my personal story, I just want to break down the CPJE and Naplex stats one layer deeper, comparing Californian-trained graduates vs other-US-graduates and non-US-graduates: California CPJE: fail/pass% 6.9 93.1 Naplex: 0.7 99.3 Other US CPJE: fail/pass% 27.2 72.8 Naplex: 3.2 96.8 Foreign CPJE: fail/pass% 39.7 60.3 Naplex: 7.7 92.3 So, to make that clear, if you studied pharmacy in California you had a 99.3% chance of passing the Naplex (compared to 92.3 for foreigners) and you had a 93.1% chance of passing the CPJE compared to just 72.8% for non-Californian graduates and an horrendously poor 60.3% for foreign pharmacists. I guess I can accept the difference in success rates for the Naplex, but how come Californian pharmacy graduates are so fantastic at passing the CPJE? What do they teach them at college that we don't know. The answer is very important, and I promise you it is NOT the law side of the exam, which if you have read Weissman as well as I have you will know the answer to every law question that comes up. Take another 5 minute break and read the exam outline for the CPJE: http://www.pharmacy.ca.gov/forms/exam_outline_after0406.pdf My alternate interpretation of this is that there are 25 Law questions, 25 community pharmacy questions and 25 hospital pharmacy questions. And if they weight them in any way differently it is heavily scored towards the hospital (or clinical) questions. So, my assumption is that the Californian Schools of Pharmacy go all out to teach their students the real hard core clinical pharmacy that I never even touched when I was an undergraduate, apart from by looking at pages in a book, and once or twice putting some chemicals into the brain stem of a recently-alive frog. I think this is the issue that needs to be looked at by us foreign grads, as I believe it is our greatest weakness, and why so many of us fail this easy-feeling but actually very hard-to-pass exam. Finally, I would add that from the minute breakdown right at the end of the report HERE you will see that passing the CPJE is a real challenge for Indian, Philippino, N.Korean and Yugoslavian graduates (at least for the six-month period this covers). In the previous 6-month breakdown HERE the weakest link includes Russians and Egyptians. So, we do badly. But a lot of Americans fail this test too. But all I want to try and do is isolate what the Californians do so much better than us so that we can try and focus our energies on our weakest area/s and bring our results up a little. I had thought is was perhaps lack of knowledge of US pharmacy law, hence I studied that until I was expert, but having sat the exam, and seen my result, my conclusion is that the area we should actually focus on is the clinical side. Ok, you can give yourselves another 5-minute break for having got this far. This is probably my LAST and FINAL entry in this blog and I want to include everything, so my apologies for it being a long winded posting. I sat the CPJE on September 19th 2009 and I was reliably informed by everyone including the Californian Board of Pharmacy that it takes at least four weeks for the result to come out. I had looked at the mail box early yesterday but the post hadn't arrived so I had forgotten about it until my wife came home late in the evening and decided to check again. I was absolutely NOT expecting a letter from the BOP this soon so I wasn't really thinking about it. When my wife walked in I could sense she was scrutinizing one letter particularly closely and then... I had been told by one friend who had recently become registered that when you get the second letter if you have passed it comes with a green form for you to apply to become registered as a licensed pharmacist. I assume if you don't pass they give you a second page with a breakdown of areas of weakness like I am told they do for the FPGEE. So my wife looks up at me and she say's, "Oh, I'm sorry, I really wanted you to open this but..." You know, dear followers, I have been so incredibly fortunate. I passed the FPGEE first time, I passed the iBT-TOEFL first time, I managed to get not one but two H1B-sponsors first time, AND I managed to get one of my H1B-applications pulled in the lottery first time; I then passed the Naplex first time and now... I started this process way back around early 2006. My wife and I had a chat about coming to America and to investigate what we had to do to realize that dream. We went through some really incredulous moments trying to just apply to sit the FPGEE and I was so frustrated by the process I decided to write a blog following the never-ending battle against red-tape and bad luck. But now, four and a half years later... My wife says to me, "I couldn't help it, I can read through the envelope it says here..." I have had one hell of a run of luck so far, I have timed everything to such incredible perfection. I bailed out of an amazing business in the UK just before the market crumbled, I moved to the US just before the economy made the chances of getting an H1B-sponsor as a pharmacist far harder than ever before, and now, 4-days less than a year since I started my internship... My wife says, "it says 'congratulations you have successfully passed the required..'" And she was not the only one screaming with delight! Through the envelope the address label was actually on the green sheet as my friend had told me. I guess if the address is on white paper you might not want to open it so fast. But I passed the bastard CPJE!! I have done it, done it ALL, done it done it done it. And so this story is at an end, but this is not the end of the story. I still have to become a green-card carrying permanent resident of the United States of America, and I am sure as I progress onwards I will have many a tale to tell of life as an R.Ph., and so I have decided to end this blog with the birth of another. Before I give the link to that blog (which I haven't really started yet, just put up an introduction) I want to once again thank each and every one of you for taking the time to read this story of my crazy journey from there to here. I am sure you will have had equally fabulous adventures as you move along the path of life, and I wish everyone as much success as I have been blessed with to have passed every hurdle so smoothly, to have had such a supportive wife and 3 kids always believing in me, and all of you, for reading my outpourings, my stresses and my successes, and for wishing me well at every step of the way, thank you, really, thank you. And here's where the next story will start: http://us-rph.blogspot.com/ Take care and may G-d be with you in all that you do, every step of the way. Farmacyst AKA Steven C:-)