Test | Association says the failure rate is higher than usual

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By ADAM BOWIE
bowie.adam@dailygleaner.com

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More paramedic graduates have failed their provincial licensing exam this year than in recent memory, says a top official at the provincial certification body.

Chris Hood, executive director of the Paramedic Association of New Brunswick, said 94 prospective paramedics have written their provincial licensing exam to date, and only 54 passed the test.

Even though the students had completed the paramedic training requirements, they must pass a comprehensive test before earning a provincial licence that allows them to work as a paramedic in New Brunswick.

Hood said having only 57 per cent of the provincial licence applicants pass the exam on their first try is significantly lower than in previous years. He said he's not sure why that's happened.

He said normally about 80 per cent of all licensing applicants pass the test on the first try.

Hood said officials at the paramedics' association are reviewing the results in an effort to determine whether or not there were any specific sections of the test on which students scored poorly.

"We're way low this year," he said.

"We're actually compiling statistics right now to see if there are any commonalities about where people went wrong - if there are gaps in education, those types of things."

Hood said about 90 per cent of the students who have written the provincial tests were recent graduates from the Atlantic Paramedic Academy. He said the other applicants completed their training at Holland College or from programs offered in western Canada.

Conrad Landry, executive director of the Atlantic Paramedic Academy, said he's disappointed that many of the school's students failed the exam on their first try.

"Yes, percentage-wise, it looks bad. But (students from) other colleges are failing this exam too, so that would bring some concerns to the exam itself," he said.

"If two or three different colleges graduate paramedics, and they're all failing the Paramedic Association of New Brunswick's exam, then that's kind of, 'OK, is it the colleges' problem, or is that an exam problem?' "

Landry said he has concerns about how the association has developed its provincial licensing exam.

He said he hopes to find out soon whether it follows national standards and he believes the association should also do a better job of informing applicants about what kinds of things they should be studying.

"If you're going to test them, let them know (what will be on the test), and test them on a national (standards) level," he said.

"And if you do those two things and my students still fail, then we are the problem. Right now, there's too many variables to say, 'Is it the test? Is it the students? Is it the school?' ... You can't make a decision on all these variables."

Landry said he doesn't believe the paramedics' academy has developed its training course to reflect the country's National Occupational Competency Profile - a Canadian standard that every training facility must follow.

Hood said the association's licensing exam follows the standards and this year's edition of the provincial licensing exam featured essentially the same questions that were asked in the past several years.

He said the test changes every year, but the association compiles each test from the same bank of possible exam questions.

Hood said students who failed the provincial licensing test aren't out of luck yet.

He said they can rewrite it the last week of July or the second week of August.

Hood said there's no limit to how many times a student may write the exam within a year of their graduation date.

But he said that if they fail to pass the test in that year, they'll be required to retake the full 10-month course at an average cost of $12,000 for tuition and textbooks.

The poor test results come in the wake of some complaints by former students that said the Atlantic Paramedic Academy cut corners this past academic year while training its students. The academy denied those claims.