Students had to achieve an average of 63% across two new-look papers to pass the June registration exam, the lowest pass mark since the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) took responsibility for the assessment in 2011, the regulator told C+D last week.

This June’s pass mark dropped five percentage points in comparison to last year’s pass mark of 68%.

Some 95% of students passed this June’s exam – the highest pass rate in four years. Posting on the C+D website, pharmacist Syd Bashford said it was “no wonder” that so many students had passed the exam, due to the “lowly” pass mark.

The GPhC said it will publish a more detailed analysis of the exam in early September. But it pointed out that the assessment’s new format and the new process of determining the pass mark mean it is “difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions” about the exam in comparison with previous years.

Publish pass mark reasons

Community pharmacist Susan M Shepherd said the GPhC’s examination board should publish the reasons for the low pass mark, and stressed that the new exam format – which was updated to focus on “patient-facing pharmacy practice” – is not a sufficient reason for doing so.

“As a profession, we should have some input into the future direction being taken and the standards trainees are expected to achieve,” she posted on the C+D website.

Community pharmacist Paul Samuels wondered why the pass mark had changed “so drastically” since 2015, and said he would not have expected any of his former pre-reg students to have passed the exam with such a low percentage.

But pharmacist Cathy Cooke stressed that the registration exam is only intended as a “surrogate” indication of trainees’ ability to practice as pharmacists. The 63% pass mark did not necessarily mean some candidates who passed were “inadequately competent” to practise, she added.

A community pharmacist posting on the C+D website as Pillman UK pointed out that the pass boundaries should be adjusted if the exam’s questions were more difficult. “I just think there are too many variables to make sweeping statements at the moment,” they said.

The GPhC told C+D that under a new process, the difficulty of each question and the pass mark of the exam is now determined before a paper is sat, rather than afterwards. This means the regulator now has a better understanding of the exam in advance, it added.