Comparing Student Performance on the Old vs New Versions of the NAPLEX

Area of Science:

• Pharmacy Education
• Licensure Examinations

Background:

• The North American Pharmacy Licensure Examination (NAPLEX) is a critical measure of pharmacy graduate competency.
• Understanding the impact of examination version changes on student performance is essential for accreditation and educational quality.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate whether the 2016 NAPLEX version influenced scaled scores and pass rates.
• To control for confounding variables such as student performance on the Pharmacy Curricular Outcomes Assessment (PCOA), Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT), and GPA.

Main Methods:

• Utilized doubly robust estimation with weighted propensity scores on data from 2014-2016 classes (n=201).
• Compared NAPLEX scaled scores and pass rates between pre-2016 and 2016 versions.
• Included PCOA and P3 GPA as covariates for propensity scoring.

Main Results:

• No statistically significant difference was observed in weighted NAPLEX scaled scores between the old (2014-2015) and new (2016) versions.
• The change in first-time NAPLEX pass rates between the examined versions was also non-significant.

Conclusions:

• The 2016 NAPLEX version, in isolation, did not significantly affect examination scores or first-time pass rates when accounting for student academic background.
• Further research with larger, multi-institutional datasets is recommended to validate these findings.