The PCAT was retired on 10 January 2024. The final testing window ran from 3 to 9 January 2024, and no sittings have been offered since. If you are applying to pharmacy school now, you do not need to take it, and no program can ask you for a score that no longer exists.
This page explains why the exam ended, what admissions committees look at instead, and what the test involved for anyone researching it after the fact.
Why was the PCAT retired?
The American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy and Pearson announced the retirement together, citing declining use of the test and the market conditions behind it. Fewer schools had been requiring it each cycle, and fewer applicants had been sitting it as a result.
That decline started well before the announcement. Pharmacy admissions had been moving toward holistic review for years, and by the end most programs had already dropped the requirement on their own. The retirement confirmed a shift that had mostly finished happening.
The PCAT had been used for pharmacy admissions since 1974.
What do pharmacy schools require instead?
Nothing has replaced it. There is no successor exam, and PharmD admissions no longer involve a standardised test at the overwhelming majority of programs.
What that means in practice is that the rest of your application carries more weight than it used to. With no score to sort candidates by, committees lean on:
- Your GPA, both overall and in the prerequisite courses specifically
- Whether you have finished the required prerequisite coursework
- Pharmacy or healthcare experience, and what you took from it
- Your personal statement and letters of recommendation
- The interview, which now does more of the work of separating similar applicants
If you were counting on a strong test score to offset a weaker transcript, that route is closed. The counterweights now are experience and how well you explain it.
What if you already have a PCAT score?
Scores from the final sittings are years old at this point and no program requires them. You can still mention a strong score if a supplemental application gives you somewhere to put it, but treat it as a footnote rather than part of your case. Nobody is comparing you against other applicants on it, because most of them never took it.
What was the PCAT?
The Pharmacy College Admission Test was a standardised exam that measured reading, writing, and knowledge of chemistry, biology and mathematics, built around the aptitudes that correlate with science coursework. It had five parts: one writing prompt and four multiple-choice subtests.
What subjects did it cover?
After a 30-minute writing prompt, the four scored subtests were:
- Biological Processes (45 minutes): general biology, microbiology, human anatomy and physiology
- Chemical Processes (45 minutes): general chemistry, organic chemistry, basic biochemistry
- Critical Reading (50 minutes): comprehension, analysis, evaluation
- Quantitative Reasoning (50 minutes): basic maths, algebra, probability and statistics, pre-calculus, calculus
How long was the PCAT?
Total testing time was 220 minutes including a 15-minute break. The test also carried unscored questions used to develop future versions, and candidates could not return to a section once its time expired.
Was the PCAT harder than the MCAT?
No, and the gap was wide enough that the comparison was never close.
The MCAT covers psychology, sociology, human development, behaviour and physics, none of which appeared on the PCAT. Its biology section goes considerably deeper. The MCAT also runs far longer, with longer reading passages, so it tests stamina in a way the PCAT did not.
The comparison still comes up because applicants weighing pharmacy against medicine want to know what they are signing up for. The honest answer is that the entrance exam was never the hard part of either path.
How was the PCAT scored?
Each multiple-choice question was worth one raw point with no penalty for wrong answers, so there was no reason to leave anything blank. The essay was scored from 0 to 6 by two separate graders. Raw scores converted to scaled scores, and the composite ran from 200 to 600.
What counted as a good PCAT score?
Using the bands Kaplan Test Prep published while the exam was running:
- 431 and above: top 10% of candidates
- 417 to 430: top 25%
- 402 to 416: solid, though short of the most competitive programs
- 401 and below: below average
There was never a published minimum. Committees read the whole application, which is even more true now that there is no score in it at all.
How many times could you take it?
Candidates were allowed five attempts, with a sixth possible in limited circumstances.
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Where to go from here
With no admissions test in the picture, the useful next steps are working out what programs actually ask for and how competitive you are against it: