An evaluation of the pharmacy college admissions test as a tool for pharmacy college admission committees

American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, Fall 2001 by Kelley, Katherine A, Secnik, Kristina, Boye, Mark E

SUMMARY

In the new PharmD educational environment, the PLAT is a valuable tool for use in the pharmacy school admissions process. Even given that the test adds another step in the process of admissions, these authors believe that the information outweighs the potential for the PCAT to function as a barrier to pharmacy school admissions. Although there are statistically significant differences between groups in mean composite percentile PLAT score on the variables of gender, race and native language, these differences are probably not practically meaningful. Race was the only variable where statistically significant differences were maintained across pre-pharmacy GPA, PCAT composite percentile, and first-quarter pharmacy GPA. However, the low number of students in the minority group could have biased this result. The lack of statistical power to detect a difference should not be used as a justification for decreasing the attention we need to pay to the real issue of minority recruitment and retention. The two independent variables, pre-pharmacy GPA and PCAT composite percentile scores, explain approximately 35 to 51 percent of the variance in first-quarter pharmacy GPA. There appears to be a critical threshold of PCAT scores (

Acknowledgement. The authors would like to thank OSU's PharmD admission committee and Dean John M. Cassady for support in this study.

References

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