How can the ACPE continued to be our accreditation agency when the board exam passage is so low especially at the new schools?
Something should have been done in 2008, not 2017.
Chapman University was not granted full accreditation. The associated dean was assuring everyone on SDN that his school would get full accreditation. Still Candidate Status!
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And possibly 2004 or earlier. However, there is precedence for LOWER passage scores. In the 80s, it was rather common for the first board attempts to be in the 60-70%. NY and MN's practical board routinely failed 30% in that era. CALPLEX used to be BCPS-lite, and BCPS used to be the ABIM exam minus the diagnostic parts (if you compare the old BCPS exams with today's, the difference is startling to ). That's from the times when the Board meant a damn. But the comparison issue is that the NAPLEX is not at the same sort of standard (I refuse to believe that the minimal standard should be that low) than it used to be, and schools that cannot pass their graduates at that low bar should be subject to scrutiny or elimination.
About ACPE accreditation, it's not possible to get final accreditation until Board passage rates for a class are attained. That's why states have on the books that a school that only has candidate status may attempt the boards. HOWEVER, there is also precedence for a state saying that the Boards are granted, but the license can only be conferred once a school passes accreditation (CA in the case of Creighton's over 20 years ago after they had a similar debacle). This hasn't been invoked anytime recently, but maybe someone should do so. I don't HICP made it that far for their students to attempt the exams.
There's two different accreditation bodies that a school is worried about in this case:
1. Professional accreditation (National) - Needed to deal with pharmacy and the other professional/technical degrees (even ACM for Chemistry and with AAES for Chemical Engineering). You don't have this, a state or the federal entities may not let your graduates certify with that degree alone.
2. C-RAC Regional accreditation - Much bigger deal that Professional accreditation. You don't get/maintain this accreditation, you can't be the direct recipient of guaranteed student federal loans to your education institution (and most private loans become a riskier proposition). More broadly, there's articulation guidelines that mandate transfer protocols (a school basically has to have one that meets the accrediting body's standards) between different schools within the same accreditation body that has an effect of standardizing curriculum (even in the professional schools).
If I were Chapman, I'd be more concerned with the Regional accreditation impact, because that will get him fired if this threatens it. For the ACPE, only if they threaten revocation or states make it a point to not allow Chapman graduates to license would it be a problem for him. But come on, it's pharmacy, do you think we peer institutions would actually go that far in a case where they are one of ours?
I don't think though that the lawsuits issue is that big a deal against ACPE. The C-RAC would retaliate pretty hard against the institution as a whole for doing that (Bob Jones University and somewhere else in TN setting the latest precedents), so I can't see Chapman doing that with threatening their other cash cows. Who knows, maybe Chapman might get it together?
Still though, we've had dumb practitioners since the beginning. The situation takes care of itself (even though patient care as a whole drops). But it's not just ours, look at medicine and nursing for the griping about students so stupid and unenergetic; you think you have to water them daily. These complaints have always been part of the business as we always expect better (and get worse as it's a numbers game). But yeah, there is a part of me that thinks the profession is paid too much as we get too many people who obviously should be doing something else getting into pharmacy because it pays too well for them to do their original plan.
