End of Rotation exams are a set of objective, standardized evaluations intended to serve as one measure of the medical knowledge students gain during specific supervised clinical practice experiences
End of Rotation Faculty Guide
This faculty guide offers context for End of Rotation exam development, including blueprints, topic lists, exam items, and core tasks and objectives, as well as the overall construct validity. Download the Guide.
PAEA has permanently waived our proctoring requirements for the End of Rotation exams. Please see the Delivery section of the Content page for more information on the current state of proctoring.
Detailed
Each 120-question exam is built on a content blueprint and topic list developed by experienced PA educators and national exam experts, specifically for PA programs.
Validated
All exam questions go through multi-stage peer review by PA educators and are statistically validated for accuracy and consistency by professional psychometricians.
Flexible
The exam can be delivered in a proctored or unproctored mode, onsite or remote, with a secure testing window.
Guiding Principles
Several cross-cutting criteria guide the development and delivery of the End of Rotation exams. The goal of these ideals is to assist the exam development team in ensuring that the exams, to the extent a multiple-choice exam can, evaluate a wide breadth of dimensions critical to a PA student’s preparation. This list has evolved as the End of Rotation exam program has matured.
- The End of Rotation exam blueprints are two-dimensional, meaning that they are organized by task and content area. Each End of Rotation exam is built to blueprint and topic list specifications. Questions encompass a representative sample of content topics and may not reflect all content topics identified in the topic lists.
- Questions developed for End of Rotation exams reflect the needs of a broad variety of patients whom PAs will treat.
- Questions developed for End of Rotation exams cover the lifespan and reflect a variety of patient care settings with some specifications in the seven core areas:
- Emergency Medicine
- Full lifespan
- Emergency department, urgent care
- Family Medicine
- Full lifespan
- Ambulatory, urgent care, and long-term care
- General Surgery
- Full lifespan
- Ambulatory, emergency department, inpatient, and perioperative
- Internal Medicine
- Adult and geriatric
- Ambulatory, inpatient, and long-term care
- Pediatrics
- Infants, children, and adolescents
- Ambulatory, emergency department, and inpatient
- Psychiatry and Behavioral Health
- Full lifespan
- Ambulatory, emergency department, and inpatient
- Women’s Health
- Adolescent and adult
- Ambulatory, emergency department, inpatient, and perioperative
- Emergency Medicine
- Questions are geared toward a PA student who has completed the relevant supervised clinical practice experience.
- Questions are typically presented in vignette format so the exams can better assess problem-solving and critical thinking.
- Each End of Rotation exam consists of 120 multiple-choice questions, 100 of which are scored. The other 20 questions are unscored pre-test questions used to gather statistics, which aid in future exam construction.
- The End of Rotation exam contains two 60-question sections.
- Each End of Rotation exam has at least two forms, providing the option for a re-test form should a student fail the first administration. Family medicine has three forms available for administration. This allows programs with two family medicine rotations to test twice with End of Rotation exams and still retain a third form for re-testing.
- End of Rotation exams are intended to be used in conjunction with other evaluation modalities when assigning a student grade for a supervised clinical practice experience.
- End of Rotation exams are delivered in the PAEA Assessment Center.
- End of Rotation exams may be delivered proctored, unproctored, or with a third-party remote proctoring service, with a set time of two hours with a 10-minute break between sections.
- Items are randomized for each student administration, within each section of the exam, and form assignments are randomized within each cohort to ensure exam security.
- Scores are reported in a way that allows students and programs to see where students fall compared to other PA students taking the same standardized exam nationwide.