The Pharmacy Times has published a two-part interview with Jasmina Bjegovic which explores the recommendations of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy task force on the continued use of the TOEFL as a requirement in the certification of foreign trained pharmacists.
There are a couple of interesting things here:
- The NABP will implement the task force’s recommendations. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise, but it wasn’t necessarily a given. This is confirmed by a note on the NABP website. So at some point in the near future, pharmacists will have the option of taking the OET instead of the TOEFL… and will be able to make use of the TOEFL’s “MyBest Scores” system.
- In 2020, the NABP introduced a requirement that foreign trained pharmacists complete the TOEFL before taking the FPGEC (that is, the certification exam itself). I remember when that happened, but didn’t think too hard about it. Apparently, that change reduced the number of FPGEC test candidates by 50%… but the FPGEC pass rate increased from 74% to 91%.
Anyway. My question is whether the task force – which met in November – explored the changes to the TOEFL which were set to be implemented three months later. As the changes transformed the TOEFL into something wholly new, they could have impacted the test’s usefulness for this purpose.