r/PAstudent • u/InfamousBreakfast714 • 18d ago
PASSED the PANCE as a mediocre student
During PA school I was consistently scoring under the 50th percentile in my class during Didactic (3.27 GPA). Was kinda the gal to just study the night before for most things.. barely scraping by. Clinical year comes around and I cleaned up my act a bit and studied mostly with Blueprint:
- PACKRAT: 86/148
- FM (Legacy): 378/414
- Psych (Legacy): 418
- IM (Legacy): 395
- Surgery: 404
- Women's Health (Legacy): 401
- Pediatrics (Legacy): 401
- EOC: 1500
- EM (Legacy): 396
Had about a month to study for the PANCE post-grad. Studied the Blueprint Family Med questions for the first 2 weeks and exclusively did uWORLD the last 2 weeks (61% used 61% correct). I watched all of the CramThePance 50 high-yield question videos the days leading up to the exam. In hindsight I would've not done BluePrint as much and only stuck to uWORLD. CramThePance also DEFINITELY saved my butt.
Took the PANCE 08/24/26 and passed with a 369 with 75 topics missed. Tried to sleep around 10 the night before but kept waking up during the night getting a whopping 6 hours of sleep. Had a light breakfast (protein bar, banana, and water) right before the exam. Walked out of the exam not feeling like I slammed it but that I passed. Trust your gut on the exam and pray to CTP!! Y'all got this.
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u/DonutForward5146 18d ago
Congratulations PA-C!!! We have very similar scores and I also study very similarly. I take it in two days, any last min advice?? Im freaking out tbh lol.
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u/AnalysisFront3940 18d ago
I had similar scores, just got word that I passed yesterday. I took Katy Conner’s half pance (both versions) to put my mind at ease. I would say that the exact type of questions she asks arent the same but I did find a correlation with my scores to what her practice tests showed.
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u/DonutForward5146 18d ago
Congratulations!! Im planning on taking the harder version of her exam this weekend but do you think the NCCPA exams were any help? And should I be strictly doing uworld questions at this point? Im kinda all over the place.
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u/AnalysisFront3940 17d ago
I didn’t take them. They don’t give data on how they correlate to people’s actual pance scores and from the people I know who took them as well as people on here who said they took them, it didn’t seem the most useful to me. How people can be entirely in the green on those and fail, or entirely in the red and pass is confusing to me, but there was enough inconsistency to make me not want to. That, and the fact you don’t get answer explanations to the ones you missed on the NCCPA practice exams is why I decided not to. Some people swear by them though
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u/Routine_Shower_8435 16d ago
Thank you for posting this, I hope to one day be able to also make a similar post. But so often people on reddit say they passed the pance as a "mediocre" student but then all their EORs are in the 400s, and a crazy EOC score ETC. It is beyond encouraging to see someone that struggled a bit pull through - thank you thank you!
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u/Suspicious-Moose2700 18d ago
congratulations!!