Physician Assistant Summative Evaluation (PASE)

The School of Physician Assistant Studies will conduct a comprehensive summative assessment for each student in the final four months of the program. Collectively known as Physician Assistant Summative Evaluation (PASE), the program will use a series of assessments to verify that each student meets the program competencies required for clinical practice. The PASE will measure each student’s medical knowledge, clinical reasoning and problem-solving skills, clinical and technical skills, interpersonal skills, and professional behaviors.  PASE will use a combination of traditional testing and authentic assessments explicitly designed to correlate with program competencies. Students must be entrustable with all competencies to be considered eligible for graduation.

Between the sixth and seventh supervised clinical practice experience, each PA student must complete the PASE. During this comprehensive series of evaluations, the School of Physician Assistant Studies will assess the acquisition of the program's required competencies for new graduates. Students will be tracked with the Summative Testing Assessment Tool, ensuring that each student successfully acquired each assessed competency.  Failure to achieve any program competencies will result in focused remediation and reassessment. Students must remediate and reassess until the targeted performance level is obtained. Through this methodology, the program can verify that each student has achieved the required competencies for graduation. 

The program will not use reviews of previous evaluation methods or evaluation products designed for individual student assessment (e.g., PACKRAT) in lieu of or to fulfill the summative testing requirements.

PASE is divided into three distinct sections, each of which is designed to assess the acquisition of specific domains of programmatic competence.

Students must be deemed entrustable on all programmatic competencies. As such, any pre-entrustable scores will require remediation and reassessment as follows:

• End-of-Curriculum Exam: This exam, which is standardized, peer-reviewed, and statistically validated, utilizes scaled scoring. Any performance that is below the “Satisfactory Medical Knowledge” range, as determined by the Physician Assistant Education Association's (PAEA)  policy level descriptor,  is a failure and must be remediated. Remediation will be focused on areas of deficiency and will be reassessed by a second EOC exam no sooner than sixty (60) days of initial test date. If the student’s repeat performance is not at least within the “Satisfactory Medical Knowledge” on the reassessment, then graduation will be delayed for a remediatory Supervised Clinical Practice Experience (SCPE). This rotation will be selected by the Progression and Accountability Council based on performance and areas of deficit. The student will then be reassessed with the applicable End-of-Rotation exam and must score at or above -1.25 standard deviations from the mean to be considered entrustable. Failure of this End of Rotation Exam will result in dismissal from the program.  

• CATs and OSLERS: These authentic, time-dependent assessments will serve as practical evaluations of competency. Students who are pre-entrustable with any portion of these two assessments, must be remediated and reassessed.  This process will continue until the student is deemed entrustable on all associated competencies. In rare circumstances in which a student fails to be deemed entrustable for a given competency after multiple reassessments, the PAC will meet and decide if a delay of graduation and remediatory supervised clinical practice experience is warranted.