About Practice Exams

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.

• Practice exams can be purchased for $50 per exam. While you can only take the exam(s) one time per purchase, there is no limit to the number of times you can purchase the exam(s).
• A practice exam must be completed within 180 days and can be repurchased after completion or after 180 days lapse.
• PANCE and PANRE practice exams each consist of 120 multiple-choice questions. Each CAQ practice exam consists of 60 multiple-choice questions.
• You will have 60 minutes to complete each block of 60 questions. You do not need to complete the exam in one sitting. Closing your browser will stop the timer and the answers you have submitted will be recorded. When you log back in to the exam you will be returned to your last question, as long as you are still within the 180-day timeframe.
• 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 180^th day and you will not be charged. Per NCCPA policy, no refunds will be issued for a practice exam.
• You may see slight differences in exam questions if you retake a practice exam, as they are refreshed periodically with the most current information.
• You will receive a performance profile after completion of a 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 blueprints. A sample performance profile for PANCE can be found here, for PANRE here, and a CAQ here.

• 3 PANCE
• 2 PANRE
• 1 CVTS CAQ
• 1 Dermatology CAQ
• 1 Emergency Medicine CAQ
• 1 Geriatric Medicine CAQ (COMING SOON)
• 1 Hospital Medicine CAQ
• 1 Nephrology CAQ
• 1 OBGYN CAQ
• 1 Occupational Medicine CAQ
• 1 Orthopaedic Surgery CAQ
• 1 Pediatrics CAQ
• 1 PMHC CAQ
• 1 Psychiatry CAQ

Find answers to Frequently  asked questions.

NCCPA’s practice exams are offered for educational purposes only.They are 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 exams include 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 CAQs 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 PANCE 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 exams 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.

We recommend using the latest version of one of the supported browsers below. You will need to temporarily  turn off your pop-up blocker to access a Practice Exam. Click the link below to learn how to do this for your browser.

• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari
• Microsoft Edge
• Mozilla Firefox
• Any other modern web browser compatible with HTML5 and CSS3

If your web browser is not listed or you continue to experience problems, please contact us at [email protected] or 678-417-8100.