Just four in 10 students (41%) who sat the exam passed, compared with 64% of students who passed the September assessment last year, the regulator announced today (October 28).

Of the 660 candidates who sat the exam, just 269 passed, compared with 95% of students who passed the June sitting.

September's exam had already proven controversial before the results were released. Some students threatened to protest over the perceived difficulty of the two papers, while an online petition demanding the "traumatic" exam be reviewed garnered more than 600 signatures.

September's assessment marked the second sitting of the GPhC's revamped registration assessment, which it said would allow students to better demonstrate their clinical skills.

The British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association met with the regulator to discuss the exam earlier this month. The GPhC’s board of assessors will meet with the BPSA in the future to discuss the exam further, it said in a report on the assessment , also published today.

GPhC chief executive Duncan Rudkin congratulated those who passed the exam. The assessment is an important “tool” to make sure that only students who will be able to practice “safely and effectively” become qualified pharmacists, he stressed.

Why was the pass rate so low?

The GPhC’s board of assessors pointed out that the September sitting of the exam tends to have a lower pass rate in general because more students are taking it for the second or third time

Students taking the September sitting because they failed the exam in June may not have improved much over the three-month period, it noted. The board will monitor this trend in the future to see whether changing the dates of the exams could benefit students, it said.

The board also suggested that September’s cohort appeared to be have performed “significantly weaker” on the calculations paper than students in June. This could suggest why some did not manage to complete the paper last month, it added.

However, it refuted the BPSA’s suggestion that that it should review the amount of time students are given to complete the second part of the exam. There is “no verifiable evidence” suggesting that the time allocated was “inappropriate”, it stressed.

How have September pass marks changed?