
The technique has been taught to students of applied science for longer than I have been able to determine and for the sole reason that students using it make fewer mistakes. This process is fairly trivial, and with only slight attention to detail, you always get the right answer, bing-bang-boom, every time. You're then left with only the units you do want (the ones in your answer). For every problem you can just take the factors associated with it and arrange them so all the units you don't want cancel out. So what someone figured out is that you don't need formulas at all. This always happens if the formula is correct and you plug in the appropriate factors. There are lots of formulas out there, but here's the big idea: when you plug values into a formula and pay close attention to what happens to the units as the formula is simplified, you'll see that all the units cancel out except those units that end up in your answer. When you're doing applied math numbers have units of measure, or "dimensions," attached to them. The one-page all-you-really-need-to-know guide.ĭrug calculation quiz I took to get my first job. Or how I came to post so much stuff on this Web site. Med-Math Errors and the Nursing Student.Conversion Factors for Nursing Students.

Learn dimensional analysis by working through the answers.

