(478) Aspiring Academics Project: Beyond the Letter Grade: Rethinking Educational Models in Pharmacy Education

Objective : To review the literature on traditional and alternative grading models used in healthcare professions’ education and discuss each one's advantages and disadvantages.

Methods: The Aspiring Academics program contributes to the development of future faculty members in the academy as a program for students to learn about academic pharmacy. The selected students are assigned a current topic relevant to pharmacy education to research during the year. A PubMed literature review was conducted using “competency based education”, “competency-based education”, “mastery learning”, “traditional grading”, and “pass-fail” terms in any healthcare professions’ training, excluding models used in experiential education, one classroom setting or course, or outside the US. Literature was collated and summarized at monthly meetings for consensus on inclusion. Four grading models were agreed upon and their description, advantages, and disadvantages were summarized independently.

Results: Traditional grading, using letter grades, facilitates student comparisons and evaluates knowledge, but may not gauge clinical skill or performance. Pass-fail grading eliminates the need for a detailed breakdown of student performance, reduces student competitiveness and allows for higher order learning, but lacks specificity in identifying individual strengths and weaknesses and makes grade interpretation difficult. Mastery learning offers individualized support for remediation to achieve subject mastery, but may increase faculty workload and overwhelm students. Competency-based education is based on evolving healthcare and population needs but requires substantial resources and may overlook critical thinking development.

Conclusions: Pharmacy education employs diverse educational models but lacks standardized definitions, implementation practices, and consistent minimum standards. Limited literature exists on their impact on faculty, student performance, and practice readiness. Future research should explore the distribution of each model in schools/colleges of pharmacy, best practices, and their correlation with student outcomes and practice-readiness.