Right maths, wrong answer in Part A
Part A does not give you four options to choose between. You work the calculation out and you type the answer in, and because you type it, the form of the answer is part of the answer. A good number of marks go there, and they go while the arithmetic is right.
The shape of the thing first. Fifteen questions and thirty minutes, so two minutes each, with a calculator on the screen and an erasable note board on the desk. You are not allowed to write on the board until the tutorial has finished, which catches people who want to jot a formula down before the clock starts. There is nothing to eliminate and no credit for a method that arrived at the wrong number, and thirteen of the fifteen is the standard the NMC currently sets for this part.
The unit is in the question, not the box
A lead-in asking how many milligrams, answered from a working that ended in grams, gets typed as a number that is a thousand times out. There is no unit in the answer box to catch it and nothing on the screen to warn you, because as far as the software is concerned you have simply typed a number.
So read the last line of the question again before you type, every time. The last line is where the unit usually lives and it is the line you are least likely to read twice.
Decimal places are an instruction, not a preference
Where the question tells you how many to give, give exactly that many. Where it does not, type the exact answer rather than a tidied one, and do not add zeroes after the point to make it look finished.
A whole tablet cannot be given in parts
Tablets are the usual trap. One and a half tablets is only an answer if the tablet is scored, and two thirds of a tablet is never an answer at all. If the arithmetic hands you something a nurse could not actually give, the arithmetic is probably not what the question wanted.
A dose ten times too large is a decimal point
It is worth the five seconds it takes to ask whether the number you are about to type is a dose a person could be given. Most calculation errors that reach a patient are not exotic ones. They are a point in the wrong place, and the exam is testing the same thing the ward is.
All four traps on one question
One dose, and four things a candidate might type. The answer is 250 micrograms and the lead-in asks for micrograms.
| What you type | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| 250 | Accepted. The lead-in asked for micrograms and this is the dose in micrograms. |
| 0.25 | Wrong. The same dose in milligrams, so the calculation was right and the answer is not. |
| 250 micrograms | Wrong, where the question asked for a number and nothing else, which is the usual instruction. |
| 300 | Wrong. Rounded, when nothing in the question asked you to round. |
Only the first row involves doing the sum correctly and the other three all follow it. That is the point of the whole part: in a typed answer, arithmetic is the first half of the work rather than all of it.
We had the same fault in our own bank
Worth admitting, because it is this problem seen from the other side. A batch of numeracy questions here had been keyed to a rounded answer while the stem never said to round, so somebody who calculated correctly and typed the exact figure was marked wrong by a rule the question had not stated. Those are rewritten. Where the exact answer fits, the exact answer is the key, and where it does not, the question now says how to round.
The marking had a matching fault. It used to accept anything within half a unit of a whole number, which quietly accepted one and a half tablets against a key of two, which is the one wrong answer somebody counting tablets actually types. It does not any more.
If numeracy is the half you are less sure of, the numeracy practice runs the six categories one at a time and under the real clock. What the pass marks are is worth reading once as well, because Part A is the stricter half of the exam and almost everybody assumes it is the easier one.