VIEWS OF STUDENTS ON PHARMACY EDUCATION: A STUDY

Pharmacy education is one of the professional courses which got a new dimension with the changing time and has shown significant growth in comparison with management and engineering education. Though the aim is high, the institutions offering pharmacy education fail to create necessary environment in producing the right quality output. As such the present study is aimed at exploring the views of respondents on various factors that influence the success of pharmacy education such as placement, laboratory facilities, infrastructure, availability of course material etc. A random sample of 150 student respondents studying pharmacy program in different colleges located in Nellore and Chittor districts of Andhrapradesh has been selected for the study. The study is aimed at identifying the relative importance of the factors, in addition to get opinion of sample respondents about their perceptions and expectations along with the gap on each of these factors. An analysis of the satisfaction of respondents shows that they have a low satisfaction on pharmacy education along with high expectation and poor perception on different factors. An appropriate statistical test such as Chi-square test of significance has been used to test the hypothesis. The test reveals that there is no significant difference of opinion on the satisfaction of the respondents in terms of gender, area of residence and place of location.