Examinations

Business as usual

The APC Examinations Team develops and delivers 3 high stakes exams for locally and internationally trained pharmacists who intend to register as a pharmacist in Australia:

Candidate attempts

In 2022-23 a total of 3419 candidates attempted an APC exam.

Total exam attempts

3419 2022-23

2378 2021-22

2188 2020-21

1180 2019-20

We saw the most significant growth in the number of KAPS exam attempts

KAPS exam attempts: 1480

1480 2022-23

799 2021-22

591 2020-21

497 2019-20

The Intern Written exam continues to be most popular in the October sessions

Intern Written exam attempts: 1855

1855 2022-23

1502 2021-22

1580 2020-21

640 2019-20

We have seen a large uptake in candidates attempting the CAOP exam since introducing remote proctored exams

CAOP exam attempts: 84

84 2022-23

77 2021-22

17 2020-21

43 2019-20

Exams content development

To create our exam content, we contract Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from across Australia. Our pool of SMEs represents a diverse range of pharmacy skills, educational backgrounds, and current professional practice environments.

In 2022-2023 we hosted in-person and remote workshops, and invited SMEs to participate in take-home assignments.

SME participation – Total SME activities:

192 2022-23

99 2021-22

Projects

To support our business as usual activities, and ensure our exams are as robust and defensible as possible we designed, developed and delivered a range of projects in the year 2022-23. These include:

Continuation and proof of concept of a novel application method to determine scale values for items (Pairwise Scaling). We presented on this topic at the CLEAR Annual Education Conference in September 2022 and were asked to follow up on our research in a poster format in September 2023
Investigation into currency of item bank using PBS data. We compared the frequency of medicines prescribed in Australia to usage in our Intern Written exam database
Close collaboration with our psychometric consultants to analyse our exam result data to support exam validity and reliability
Continuation of investigations into different question types to use in our exams
Commenced the development of a tool to rate item exposure across all forms and sessions to help us refine our business rules about item usage to support exam security