Powley Pharma Quizzer was made in response to astronomical prices that various third-party companies were charging for mock papers.
The Pre-Registration Year
As some of you may be aware, to become a pharmacist after graduating with an MPharm, you must do one year (soon to be two years – more on that later) of experience in Pharmacy. This year allows you to gain experience and be ‘signed-off’ on various pharmacist tasks. Nonetheless, you still need to pass a big exam at the end of the year which consists of a maths and theory component. This theory component is what various companies offer mocks on.
some mocks cost as much as £120
Yes that is right, one mock which typically consists of 120 questions can fetch £120! Now if you are anything like me and love to do as many mocks as possible, it becomes an expensive task. The worst part is that the RPS (supposed to be our union) are charging these astronomical fees!
The Solution
In September of 2020, a few of my friends got together: Me, Somil and Ali (who were in the preregistration year of 2020-2021) and Milan (an engineering grad from the same university cohort). We started making a question and answer database, which was cross-checked with references and double checked by someone else in our group. I must give credit to some people who did contribute to the database, but did not invest in the app/website development, namely Dong, Jay and Krishan. At the time of writing, this database contains over 1000 fully-checked questions and questions are added when we have free time (more on this later).
I was not keen on the idea from the start. However, over the coming months, Milan began to code the website. Then in January 2021, I was approached by the group with the idea of launching an app. It took much convincing for the team to get me on board, as I pondered if it was a good use of my time. Eventually, I realised that the creation of questions would be beneficial to my revision for the Summer 2021 exam.
Question creation ramped up from January 2022 on the shared spread sheet. Our website was up and running, with modifications being made primarily by Milan, and design of the app began. With many meetings and checking, hours of work, by March we had a functioning app with 500 questions. We launched the app and got word out that it was released. Investment was split equally, mainly the cost of web hosting, apple launch and google launch fees. The first iteration of the app was a quiz that takes questions from our dataset and scores you based on them. Added features like bookmarking and scoring came later.
As of now, the app sells steadily, but we really want to spread the word early in the preregistration year to stop students from forking out on these expensive mocks, when our app is a tenth of the price and has many more questions.
At the moment, we are redesigning the app, as now we have enough questions to categorise by topic, and we are adding a new personal stats feature. However, we are reducing bugs in the app before release. When the 2 year foundation placement starts (in 2026), we will need to adapt the app and change the questions.
Please do spread the word and check out the links at the start of this section.