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Kaplan Qbank Scores - Whats "Passing"?


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Steadily working through the Kaplan Qbank and getting scores between 49-72% with my overall average 64% 

 

Wondering if anyone here can give me some advice as to how this will correlate to passing the PANCE. My plan is to do more brushing up on anything I got less thant 60% on - do you think this is enough? 

What average should I be hitting to feel good about the PANCE? 

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1) This belongs in the PANCE/ PANRE section, not Professional/ General. Sure it's where the PA-Cs hang out, but we also offer advice when we have something to contribute in the appropriate section.

 

Could a mod maybe move this over please?

 

2) The actual score required to pass varies year by year, and test by test. The 3-day review course I took in early June told us that passing is somewhere in the neighborhood of 320 to 390. They set their scoring mean at 500, which would be a comfortably high pass. This also corresponds with how the NCCPA actually scores the tests, as far as I can tell (it's been a while since I was an A student in Statistics).

 

According to the NCCPA's site, the minimum reported score is 200, and the max is 800. (I get the impression there's some kind of normalized 0-1000 scale in play, but the extremes of the curve are not relevant to real life.) They also say - on their website - they set 500 as their mean, and verify the validity of that across multiple versions of the test. Call the mean 500/800 = 62.5% if you want to be blunt about it.

 

http://www.nccpa.net/Scoring

 

3) Again from the review course people, they had that mean of 500 and a standard deviation of, I want to say... maybe it was 20? 40? I don't remember. And their unofficial advice was, if you're within a standard deviation of the mean (480 or higher, or 60%, if it was 20), you basically didn't even have to study for the real test. If not, then use the score report to help you focus. Keep in mind not everything is equally emphasized on the test, so if you're great at Cardiology but shaky in Psych, it's better than if it were the other way around.

 

4) So if your average is 64%, you may in fact be golden. Having gone through PANRE prep recently, I recommend you stop stressing out. Keep preparing, do a practice test every week or every few days if you're feeling itchy about it, and get comfortable, but don't drive yourself batty.

 

5) Remember, this is a pass/fail test, and it's a test on which people routinely miss a shockingly high raw percentage of the questions -- by design. It's a test of not just what you know, but how you think, and how well you can recognize and put together the pieces they're giving you in the question. They're not trick questions, they're just complex.

 

6) Finally, remember that about 95% of the people taking PANCE for the first time pass it. Unless you seriously think you are among the 5% of terrible test-takers, you can hurt yourself far more than help yourself by over-thinking all of this.

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I put it there as well - No one seemed to be answering and I thought perhaps it got lost in the sea of people selling their PANCE material. So I figured I'd place it in a more "visible" spot to see if anyone would answer. 

 

Thank you for your response! That info is very helpful and has put me at ease. I plan on finishing up the Qbank questions and will take my exam August 8th. Wish me luck! 

 

Thanks again!

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Awesome. I didn't think to check to see if you had also posted over there. And yeah, it can be a little sales-ish.

 

Good luck to you. It sounds like you are preparing well, so after a certain point you just have to trust in all the prep you've done. They say you shouldn't touch a textbook or a practice question at all for about 24 hours before the actual test, and I think that's smart. You're very quickly getting to the point where another hour studying is not going to suddenly make you smarter, and in any case it's very unlikely that doing that one particular 10-page section is going to make or break your score. So take some deep breaths, get outside in the sunshine, and enjoy the rush. T minus 10 days.

 

Come back to this thread when you get your results, okay?

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