NCCPA offers Practice Exams to assist PAs in the preparation for PANCE, PANRE and CAQ exams. They help PAs assess their relative strengths and weaknesses, to direct their study efforts and to familiarize themselves with the types of questions they’ll see on the actual examinations.

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• 2 PANCE
• 1 PANRE
• 1 CVTS CAQ
• 1 Emergency Medicine CAQ
• 1 Hospital Medicine CAQ
• 1 Nephrology CAQ
• 1 Orthopaedic Surgery CAQ
• 1 Pediatrics CAQ

120 questions per PANCE and PANRE exam
60 questions per CAQ exam

Unlimited

$50 per exam (note: can take exam(s) one time per purchase, but can purchase as many times as you want)

180 days; may repurchase after you complete it or after 180 days lapse.

You have 60 minutes to complete each block of 60 questions, but you can pause the clock while in a block and return and finish it later, as long as it is still within the 180-day time frame.

If you are unable to take the practice exam during your scheduled 180-day window and need to reset the window, please contact NCCPA before the 180th day, and you will not be charged. Per NCCPA policy, no refunds will be issued for a Practice Exam.

You may see slight differences when retaking a Practice Exam form, as they are refreshed periodically with the most current information.

No, a Performance Profile will be given after the completion of the Practice Exam. This will give you insight related to your relative strengths and weaknesses in the content areas based on the PANCE, PANRE and CAQ content blueprints. Click here to view a sample performance profile for PANCE and PANRE. Click here to view a sample profile for a CAQ exam.

Find answers to Frequently  asked questions.

The NCCPA Practice Exam is provided for educational purposes only. It is not intended to predict your performance on any of our exams, and you should not interpret your results as a prediction of your performance. The results may assist you in identifying possible strengths or weaknesses in the various content areas that make up the exam blueprints.

While the practice exam includes the ability to change the screen color to grayscale and invert the colors, as well as increasing and decreasing the font size, these functions are only available on the practice exams and are not available on the actual PANCE, PANRE or CAQ examinations unless approved for these exam accommodations.

The content blueprint for each specific exam is used as a guideline when items are selected for the Practice Exams.  However, because the Practice Exams have fewer items than the actual exams, the content areas contain a smaller number of items. For example, approximately 3% of the PANCE content blueprint is comprised of hematology questions. Thus, on the 120-question Practice Exam, there would be only 3 to 4 questions in this content area. It is important to keep in mind that performance on a small number of items is less reliable than with a larger number of items. Your performance is based on the limited number of items sampled in the Practice Exam and should not be used as a predictor of actual performance.

The performance feedback provided on the Practice Exam is based on the last time the questions were administered before they were retired. Thus, the feedback may not reflect how the test questions would perform if administered on a current administration of each exam. The yellow area in the overall performance bar provides an indication of a borderline candidate’s performance on the Practice Exam. The horizontal black bar is your performance band on your overall performance on the Practice Exam. Each test question counts equally towards your overall performance. The larger content areas contain more questions and thus contribute more to your overall score on the Practice Exam, as well as on each actual exam.

In the content areas, the overall length of the bar is representative of the percentage of content coverage on the exam blueprint. Thus, in the sample performance profile above, the larger content areas, such as cardiovascular and pulmonary, have longer bars. The vertical black line in each content area represents the mean performance of the test questions when they were last administered on PANCE. The asterisk represents your mean performance on the test questions in each content area.