'Newest' medications on the market

[Seiya174]

Hi all!

So I know a few people who have taken the NCLEX recently (all have passed on the first attempt) but they each said the same thing.

Almost all of the medication questions, besides the most important meds (digoxin, HTN meds etc), were ones that they had never heard of. This is because they are mostly medications that are relatively new on the market and we were not taught about at all in school.

Is anyone aware of this phenomenon or has some sort of list of newly developed medications that may be on the test? It does not seem very fair that they would test on these medications knowing that most programs do not teach them.

Thoughts? Info?

Thanks in advance!

[caliotter3]

It does not make sense that they would do this, but who knows?

[Seiya174]

I agree it is not what I expected, but I have heard it from no less than five completely different people

[Double-Helix, BSN, RN]

I'm curious how these people "know" that the meds are on their tests are the newest meds on the market? Did they write down the name of each medication during the test, remember the med, and look them up later? It's not realistic to expect that every drug can be learned or taught while in school. That's why it's important to study classes of medications. NCLEX often includes questions that you can answer without knowing the exact reason for the medication. It includes these questions to test critical thinking.

NCLEX has a huge pool of questions that it pulls from. Each question, before it can appear on a test, has to be trialed and proved that it is a valid question. So the medications that appear on NCLEX have to be at least one year old, and probably more, since the NCLEX doesn't update every year. It's also highly unlikely that, in the entire pool of NCLEX questions, they would all include new medications. More than likely these are not new medications, but simply less common ones. The test taker saying that they must be new to the market is a way of rationalizing why they don't know them.

However, there are 15 questions on the NCLEX test that are being trialed. It's possible that these might include newer medications, but they don't count toward the score.

For the record, there were maybe one or two medication on my test that I was not familiar with, but I was able to deduce what they might be fore based on their root. The other medications that I had were ones that I had heard of in school or studying.