Building a Program Assessment Plan for Pharmacy Accreditation

You’ve been asked to build — or rebuild — the assessment plan for your pharmacy program. Maybe it’s a formal requirement in the standards; maybe it’s a document on a shared drive that nobody has touched since the last visit. Either way, this is one of the most consequential parts of an accreditation cycle, and one of the most misunderstood: the plan isn’t a report you write for the team. It’s the system your program runs on between visits.

This is a practical guide to building a program assessment plan that actually produces accreditation evidence. It covers what ACPE in the US and CCAPP in Canada expect on program evaluation and assessment of educational outcomes, the difference between direct and indirect measures, how to keep assessment results tied to the courses and outcomes they belong to, and the part most plans skip: using the data to change the program.

If you’ve handled curriculum mapping before, the shape will feel familiar. The difference is that an assessment plan doesn’t end at the mapping — it has to show what happened after: what the data said, what you changed, and where you can prove it.

What the Standards Ask For

Both frameworks treat program evaluation as a standing requirement, not a self-study deliverable. The wording differs; the expectation is the same: a written plan, evidence that it runs, and a record of what it changed.

Under ACPE (Standards 2025, effective July 1, 2025) [1], Standard 7 (Assessment) opens with a direct requirement: “The college or school develops, resources, and implements a plan to assess achievement of its mission, strategic plan, and attainment of educational outcomes to ensure that graduates are prepared to enter practice.” Assessment data, it adds, should be used for continuous quality improvement of the program. The key elements include:

• a written assessment plan covering the key elements of Standard 7, using “the analysis of process and outcome measures for continuous development and improvement of the program” (7.1.a) [1];
• program evaluation by stakeholders, including data from AACP standardized surveys of graduating students, faculty, and preceptors (7.2.d) [1];
• a variety of assessment approaches — “systematic, valid, and reliable knowledge-based and performance-based formative and summative assessments,” plus standardized assessments such as licensing examinations that allow national and peer comparisons (7.3.a);
• documented use of assessment data for continuous improvement of the curriculum and its delivery (7.3.b);
• measures of student achievement at defined levels of the professional outcomes, in aggregate and at the individual student level — with evidence that students are APPE-ready and graduates are Practice-ready and Team-ready (7.3.d) [1];
• and annual sharing of the major findings and actions resulting from the assessment plan with key stakeholders (7.5.a).

Under CCAPP (PharmD standards, June 2023 revision) [2], program evaluation is spread across several standards rather than one:

• Criterion 1.1 anchors the program’s intended educational outcomes to the AFPC “Educational Outcomes for First Professional Degree Programs in Pharmacy” and the NAPRA “Professional Competencies for Canadian Pharmacists at Entry to Practice” (Criterion 1.1) [2];
• Criterion 2.1 asks for the intended educational outcomes mapped to courses or course objectives, and lists metrics of student performance (such as course pass rates or milestone assessment results) among the other examples that might be considered [2];
• Standard 15 requires a governance structure responsible for program evaluation and a formal process to systematically review program content, structure, support, and outcomes — with regular evaluations, timely dissemination of results, and action plans implemented in a cycle of continuous quality improvement (Standard 15) [2];
• and Appendix 3 lists the minimum components the evaluation must cover: the overall curriculum; teaching, student assessment, and learning environments; program outcomes (including results from national board exams and feedback from students, alumni, employers, and local pharmacy regulators); resources and infrastructure; recruitment and admissions; student support services; and the evaluation and continuous quality improvement processes themselves (Appendix 3) [2].

One line from CCAPP is worth keeping in mind when you’re writing: Appendix 3 encourages the Faculty to “describe their processes for evaluating these areas and disseminating and using the information gathered from evaluations, rather than presenting all the data discussed here.” [2] The emphasis is on the process; a data dump without a process is not what the standard is asking for.

Direct and Indirect Measures

Most assessment plans fail at the same early step: they list instruments without saying what each one measures, or what kind of evidence it produces. The distinction that keeps a plan honest is the one between direct and indirect measures.

Direct measures capture student performance itself. In pharmacy, that includes the exams and performance assessments in the didactic curriculum, standardized licensing examinations, experiential evaluations from practice sites, portfolios, capstone courses, and high-stakes exams at the end of the program. ACPE’s Standard 7 calls for “systematic, valid, and reliable knowledge-based and performance-based formative and summative assessments” alongside standardized assessments that allow national comparisons (7.3.a) [1]; CCAPP’s Criterion 1.2 gives the same family — experiential evaluations, portfolios, capstone courses, high-stakes exams — as examples of the methods used to confirm practice-readiness, and asks for the results or data from them, not just a description.

Indirect measures capture perception and context: surveys of graduating students, faculty, preceptors, alumni, employers, and regulators; focus groups; exit interviews. Neither framework treats these as optional garnish. ACPE’s assessment plan is required to include data from AACP standardized surveys of graduating students, faculty, and preceptors (7.2.d), and CCAPP’s Appendix 3 lists feedback from students, alumni, employers, and local pharmacy regulators among the minimum components of program outcomes [2].

The two kinds of measure answer different questions, and a plan that only has one of them has a blind spot:

• Direct measures tell you what students can do — and where they fall short of the outcomes you stated.
• Indirect measures tell you how the program is experienced — where students, preceptors, or employers see a gap your course data hasn’t surfaced yet.

The strongest plans pair them deliberately: the direct measure establishes the baseline for an outcome, and the indirect measure checks whether the experience of the program supports it. When the two disagree, that’s information, not a contradiction.

Keeping Results Tied to Courses and Outcomes

A common failure mode: the program collects solid data — exam results, board scores, survey responses — but the results live in spreadsheets named by course or by year, with no record of which outcome each result speaks to. When the self-study asks “how do we know this outcome is being achieved?”, the answer requires archaeology.

Both frameworks expect the tie to be explicit, and they point to it in the same places:

• Outcomes to courses. CCAPP’s Criterion 2.1 asks for the intended educational outcomes mapped to courses or course objectives. ACPE’s Standard 2.2.d requires the program to document, through mapping or comparable methods, the breadth and depth of curricular content — and to map the learning outcomes of each APPE experience to the professional outcomes in 2.1.a–m [1].
• Assessments to outcomes. CCAPP’s Criterion 6.2 lists “mapping of assessment strategies to educational outcomes and learning outcomes” among the other examples of evidence that might be considered [2]. ACPE’s 7.3.d requires the assessment plan to measure student achievement at defined levels of the professional outcomes, in aggregate and at the individual student level.

The practical consequence: every assessment instrument should be able to answer two questions before it runs — which outcome does this measure, and at what level of the program? If the answer is “it’s in the course, so it probably counts,” that instrument isn’t connected. It’s just a test that happens to be in a course.

This is also where the data becomes reusable. A result that’s tied to an outcome can be cited in the self-study, in the annual report to stakeholders, and in the next cycle’s plan. A result that’s tied only to a course number can only be cited in that course’s file.

Closing the Loop: From Data to Change

The part of the assessment plan that reviewers test hardest — and the part most plans are thinnest on — is the loop: what did the data lead you to change?

Both frameworks require it, and both are specific about the evidence. ACPE’s 7.3.b states that the college or school “documents the use of assessment data for continuous improvement of the curriculum and its delivery,” and 7.5.a requires that the program make available to key stakeholders, at least annually, the major findings and actions resulting from its assessment plan [1]. CCAPP’s Criterion 15.2 expects regular evaluations, timely dissemination of results, and action plans “developed and implemented to improve results in a cycle of continuous quality improvement” — and lists, among the other examples that might be considered, a table summarizing major changes made to the program since the last visit, including the evaluation data that triggered each change [2].

A closed loop has four parts, and each one needs a document:

1. The finding. What the data showed, stated as a gap or a strength — an outcome measured below the program’s threshold in a given year, or a recurring theme in preceptor feedback.
2. The decision. What the curriculum committee (or equivalent body) decided in response, and when. Committee minutes are the natural document here.
3. The change. What actually changed: a course revised, an assessment added, a practice-experience requirement adjusted, a support service introduced.
4. The recheck. The next cycle’s results for that same outcome, showing whether the change moved the measure.

If you can only produce the first two — the finding and the decision — the loop is open. The reviewers can see that you looked at the data; they can’t see that it changed anything. And a plan that can’t show a completed loop is a plan that hasn’t run.

Where Plans Fall Apart

Three patterns show up in assessment plans, and none of them are about the standards themselves:

• The instrument graveyard. A plan lists every exam, survey, and evaluation the program uses — but not which outcome each one supports. The list is comprehensive and useless, because it can’t answer the question the self-study has to answer.
• The data without the decision. Results are collected and reported, sometimes beautifully, and the record stops there. No minutes, no action plan, no recheck. The next cycle re-collects the same data and finds the same gap.
• The plan in someone’s head. The connections between outcomes, courses, and instruments are obvious to the faculty member who designed the curriculum — and invisible to everyone else. When that person leaves, the plan goes with them, and the next cycle re-derives it from scratch.

Keeping It Connected

Ready isn’t a binder of results. It’s a state you can check at any time: for each outcome, you can see which courses and instruments measure it, what the latest results show, what the committee decided, and what changed — without opening a dozen files.

That’s the difference between a map and a hunt. One connected view, where you can start from any outcome, course, or assessment result and follow the connections to the documents that prove them. So the evidence behind your assessment plan isn’t something you assemble in the weeks before the visit — it’s something you’ve kept connected all along, from outcome to course to result to the decision that followed.

References

1. Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education, "Accreditation Standards and Key Elements for the Professional Program in Pharmacy Leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy Degree (Standards 2025)," ACPE, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://www.acpe-accredit.org/wp-content/uploads/ACPEStandards2025.pdf
2. Canadian Council for Accreditation of Pharmacy Programs, "Accreditation Standards for Canadian Educational Programs Leading to the Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D.) Degree," CCAPP, 2023 (June 2023 revision). [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/April10-2025_CCAPP-PharmD-Standards_ENG.pdf