PA Programs with a 100% 5-Year PANCE Pass Rate

A handful of PA programs in this country have gone five straight years without a single student failing the PANCE on the first try. Here's who they are — and why I'd think hard before letting that number pick your school.

You found a program with a 100% PANCE pass rate, and something in your chest went Oh, that one.

It makes perfect sense. When you are staring down a decision this expensive and this permanent, a perfect score feels like the only solid ground in the whole process. Everything else is soft — vibes from a campus tour, a forum post from 2019, somebody you follow on Instagram who went there and liked it.

So here is the list. And then I want to show you what I've learned from years of helping PAs get ready for this exam, because the number you are about to fall in love with tells you less than it looks like it does.

Which PA programs have a 100% five-year PANCE pass rate?

The table below builds itself from the PA School Finder verified directory every time you load this page. Nothing here is hand-typed, and nothing here is left over from last cycle.

Programs with a perfect five-year first-time pass rate sit at the top. Every other accredited program that publishes a five-year rate is right underneath, highest first — so you can look up your schools, not just the ones at the summit. Search by name, filter by state, click any column to re-sort.

Why does this list change every single year?

Because a five-year perfect record is a coin that has to land heads sixty times in a row.

Programs cycle on and off this list constantly, and almost never because something went wrong. A program drops off when one student — one — has a bad exam day. That's it. That's the whole story behind most of the movement you see here.

So if a school you love isn't at the very top of that table, take a breath. You are looking at arithmetic, not a warning.

What does a five-year PANCE pass rate actually measure?

It measures the students who came before you.

That's worth something. A program that consistently gets people across the line has a curriculum that works, faculty who catch struggling students early, and a culture that takes board prep seriously. Those are real.

But read that sentence again — it measures the students who came before you. It does not measure you. It does not know your science GPA, your study habits, or whether you're the kind of person who starts board review in didactic year or the week after graduation. Every year I hear from students who came out of a highly ranked program and didn't pass on the first try — and from students at programs nobody ranks who passed comfortably.

The program gets you to the starting line. You run the race.

Why is class size the most misread number on this page?

This is the one that trips up almost everybody, so I put the column right in the table.

In a class of 40, one student who doesn't pass on the first attempt costs that program two and a half percentage points. In a class of 100, that same student costs one point. Same event. Very different-looking number.

Which means a big program having a genuinely rough year and a small program having one unlucky student look nearly identical on paper. You cannot tell them apart from the percentage alone — and neither can a rankings list.

Sort the table by class size and watch what happens to the top of the list. It's a useful five seconds.

What if the program you want has no pass rate at all?

Then it probably hasn't graduated five years of students yet, and that is all it means.

A newer program has no five-year rate to report. I list those separately underneath the table instead of folding them in, because showing a blank as 100% would be a lie and showing it as 0% would be a worse one. A missing number is not a score.

If you're looking at a newer program, read two other things instead: its most recent first-time pass rate, and its accreditation status. Which brings me to the part of this page I actually care most about.

Should accreditation outrank the pass rate?

Every time. It isn't close.

A program can post beautiful exam numbers while sitting on ARC-PA Probation — and when that's true, you'll see it badged right on the row in the table above. I put it there on purpose. Of the two facts, the pass rate is the interesting one and the accreditation is the one that can affect whether you get to sit for the exam at all.

Check accreditation first. Every school. Every time. Then look at the scores.

The bottom line

Almost every accredited PA program in this country lands in the 90s on this measure. Sorting them against each other by half a percentage point is noise dressed up as information.

Use the pass rate to spot trouble, not to crown a winner. A program sitting well below the national median for several years running is telling you something real, and it's worth pulling that program's accreditation history before you apply. A program at 96% versus one at 98% is telling you nothing at all.

Once a school clears that bar, the things that will actually shape your two years are the ones no ranking measures: what it costs, where it puts you for rotations, how big the class is, whether you can live in that town, and whether you can get in.

Here's your next step. Open the table above, find the schools already on your list, and write down their numbers side by side with the tuition and the deadline. Then ask yourself honestly whether the pass rate changed a single thing about your ranking. For most of you, it won't — and that's the point.

Then go build the list properly:

• Every PA program ranked by PANCE pass rate — the full distribution, always current, if you want to see the whole picture instead of the top of it.
• The PA school decision matrix — how to weigh the factors that actually differ between programs.
• The free PA Program Match tool — build a real school list from your GPA, your hours, and where you want to live.
• PANCE pass rates by year — what the national numbers look like, and what happens if you don't pass the first time.

And when it's your turn to sit for boards, your program's five-year average won't be in the room with you. Your prep will be. That's what we built Smarty PANCE for — board review that won't blow your budget.

Pick the program that will get you licensed and that you can afford, get to, and finish. The pass rate is one line on that list. It is not the list.

Thanks for reading — I'm rooting for you. 🙂

Stephen Pasquini PA-C

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