A Crisis of Clarity: When Everyone Is Ordering From a Different Menu

This commentary explores the fragmented landscape of pharmacy education assessment frameworks and their impact on curricular design. Pharmacy education operates much like a restaurant kitchen, where multiple stakeholders influence what appears on the menu. Tools such as the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education Standards 2025 (including the Curricular Outcomes and Entrustable Professional Activities and Appendix 1), American College of Clinical Pharmacy Pharmacotherapy Toolkit, and National Association of Boards of Pharmacy North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination competencies all aim to clarify expectations, yet their misalignment creates ambiguity and inconsistency in defining the entry-level pharmacist, creating a confusing and inconsistent recipe. Our attempt to crosswalk these frameworks was unsuccessful, underscoring a critical insight: the solution is not to create an additional toolkit but to harmonize the existing ones. Such scaffolding would provide clarity in delivering PharmD programs to prepare entry-level graduates across the Academy and decrease the administrative burden of interpreting these frameworks. To advance the quality and coherence of PharmD education, the Academy and other stakeholders must commit to a coordinated, collaborative effort to align these frameworks and build the missing scaffold.