Why Do Pharmacy Students Hate Maths?

When you are confronted with a mathematical problem in an exam under time pressure, can you feel your palms turning clammy and your heart beating faster? Can you feel cold beads of sweat forming on your forehead? These are all the symptoms of arithmophobia and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you may have a fear of numbers. For some people maths is an emotional, psychological and often physical nightmare but why do so many pharmacy students have such an irrational fear of maths?

               I think initially it is a psychological problem that many people, who are not mathematically gifted, are put off maths when they have to perform quickly under pressure. It doesn’t help that we are constantly reminded that the majority of students fail the calculations part of the pre-reg exam and the more we discuss our fear of maths the more a mass-hysteria is produced. I believe that maths is mostly about confidence and luckily for prospective pharmacists, there is no particularly complex maths involved in our lives. I have been given a taste of the type of maths encountered in the pre-registration exam and once you have deciphered the questions and as long as you can carry out basic algebra, multiplication and division the answers are simple!

               However, the one thing that I cannot understand is why the pre-registration exam explicitly disqualifies calculators. I appreciate that pharmacists need to have a good grasp of mental arithmetics in order to spot major mistakes but insisting that passing the exam without the use of a calculator is a perhaps a little outdated...?

Most of the upcoming pharmacy students are people who have grown up in the world of technology where software and hard drives are replacing pen and paper. Convenience and the speed of information has increased and instead of posting a letter that could take days we post an e-mail that can travel the world in seconds. And in reality, if there was a mathematical problem, the use of a calculator just means that the problem is figured out much more quickly and accurately than using your head.

If only we could ease the pressure just a little from all the other things that us future pharmacists need to worry about by reviewing this one small factor.