PANRE/PANRE-LA Passing Score

To pass the Physician Assistant National Recertifying Examination (PANRE), an examinee must reach or exceed the passing score of 379, and to pass the Physician Assistant National Recertifying Examination Longitudinal Assessment (PANRE-LA), an examinee must reach or exceed the passing score of 1150. Passing scores are determined via a process called standard setting. Standard setting requires a panel of Physician Assistants (PA) content experts with experience about the core medical knowledge, skills, and abilities a recertifying PA should possess for safe and effective practice. The panelists are chosen to be representative of the entire PA profession on a set of criteria including practice setting, practice focus, experience in the field, and other demographic variables.

These content experts engage in an industry best-practice standard setting process that requires panelists to review individual test questions and decide whether someone who is “just qualified” would be able to answer the question correctly. The question-level ratings provided by the content experts are aggregated to define a recommended cut score. The final recommendation is taken from the decisions by the panelists. This final recommendation goes to the NCCPA Board of Directors for consideration and approval.

PANRE/PANRE-LA Reference Group

Reference groups are provided to give examinees a sense of how they compare to their peers. The reference group for PANRE comprises a representative group of PAs who have taken PANRE for the first time in their recertification cycle (regardless of whether it is their first recertification cycle or a subsequent one). Using the past two years ensures that sample sizes will be large enough to provide a wide breadth of test takers at all ability levels. The reference group for PANRE-LA is comprised of a representative group of PAs who have participated in the 2–3-year assessment.

PANRE/PANRE-LA Score Scale

Performance on PANRE and PANRE-LA is reported on a scale-score metric. Scale scores are used to place all scores on a unified scale regardless of the difficulty of any specific test form, so examinees with the same level of ability will achieve the exact same score regardless of the exam form taken. The PANRE scale has a minimum score of 200, a maximum score of 800, and a passing score of 379. The PANRE-LA scale has a minimum score of 1000, a maximum score of 1500, and a passing score of 1150.

PANRE/PANRE-LA SEM

The standard error of measurement (SEM) is used to create a range in which an examinee would score if that examinee took the test repeatedly with no additional preparation/remediation. The SEM does not affect pass/fail decisions.

Test Standardization

• PANRE
  • NCCPA builds every PANRE form to be equivalent in terms of the content blueprint, tasks, response time, and difficulty. The testing experience should be the same for all examinee, regardless of the test forms that they take. Test standardization is achieved through a process called Automated Test Assembly (ATA). During the ATA process, test forms are built to match the content specifications in the content blueprint. In addition, the test questions are selected to ensure that all test forms are approximately equal in terms of difficulty and that each form will take approximately the same amount of time to complete. Prior to the finalization of the test forms, two independent committees of PAs review each test form to make sure the content covered by the questions is relevant and reflects current standards of care. Questions that are out-of-date are removed and replaced with questions that cover similar content and are of similar difficulty. The test forms are checked one last time to ensure that statistical features have not drifted before the forms are approved for use.
• PANRE-LA
  • NCCPA builds every PANRE-LA form to be equivalent in terms of the content blueprint and clinical focus areas. Test standardization is achieved through a process called Automated Test Assembly (ATA). Each quarter, 20/25 questions are built to match the content specifications in the content blueprint. The remaining five questions are targeted questions which depend on your responses to previous quarters and your answers to confidence and relevance after taking a question. Prior to the finalization of the pool of items used in any given year, two independent committees of PAs review each question to make sure the content covered is relevant and reflects current standards of care. Questions that are out-of-date are removed and replaced with questions that cover similar content.

PANRE/PANRE-LA Blueprint

The content blueprint is a set of specifications that describes the relative proportion of questions from each content category and task area that should be included on a test form. This blueprint is the output of a practice analysis, which is an analysis of the various diseases and disorders PAs encounter and the skills they use in practice. The last practice analysis was conducted in 2021. In addition, a thorough study was conducted to evaluate the content that is Core to the PA profession. This information was collected and administered in a survey where PAs evaluated the complexity level that each disease/disorder should be evaluated. A committee of PAs used this data in order to set the blueprint that became live in 2023. This blueprint can be found here.

PANRE/PANRE-LA Subscores

Content area subscores provide examinees with information about their relative strengths and weaknesses based on their performance on the test. The subscores displayed in this score report provide the test-taker with information about performance in each content area and an indication of the standard error of measurement (SEM) for each content area. Large content areas (e.g., Cardiovascular) have greater numbers of questions, resulting in smaller SEM values. For the larger areas, the width of the SEM bar will be smaller. Smaller content areas (e.g., Hematology) have fewer questions, which leads to larger SEM values. Thus, the smaller content areas have a wider SEM bar.