Organizing Your Experiential Education Evidence: IPPE, APPE, and Practice Experiences

You're writing the experiential education section of your self-study — or you've written the first draft and now you're trying to prove it. Either way, this is the part of the cycle that looks simple on the page (“we do rotations”) and turns out to have the most moving parts: the hours, the settings, the preceptors, the assessments, and the mapping that ties all of it back to your program's outcomes.

This is a practical guide to organizing that evidence. It covers the two frameworks — IPPE and APPE under ACPE in the US, and practice experiences under CCAPP in Canada — what each requires, the evidence reviewers actually look for behind every requirement, and where the gaps tend to hide. Because the hours are easy to state. The proof is what takes the hours.

If you've handled didactic curriculum mapping before, the shape will feel familiar. The difference is that experiential evidence doesn't live in one course folder — it lives across sites, preceptors, and a year of rotations. That's exactly why it needs its own map.

Why Experiential Evidence Gets Messier Than It Looks

Both ACPE and CCAPP give you a clear number of hours of experiential learning. That number is the headline of the section — and it's the easy part. The evidence behind it is where the work lives.

The hours are a count. But a reviewer doesn't just want the count. They want to see that each hour was delivered in the right setting, under the right supervision, by a qualified preceptor, and that the experience was assessed against your stated outcomes. So the evidence behind a single line — “students complete 1,440 hours of APPE” — can include:

• course outlines specifying the required hours for each phase,
• rotation schedules and site agreements across many practice settings,
• preceptor files: selection criteria, orientation records, and evaluation forms,
• student assessment documents — how readiness was confirmed at the end of each rotation,
• the mapping that connects each experience to your program-level outcomes.

None of this is hard to produce. It's hard to find, verify, and keep in sync when it's spread across the LMS, a shared drive, a set of emails, and one faculty member's memory. That scatter is the real work of the section.

The Two Frameworks, One Shape

The labels differ by body, but the underlying structure is the same. It helps to see them side by side, because once you can, the rest of the section organizes itself.

ACPE [1] splits experiential learning into two phases. IPPE — the Introductory Pharmacy Practice Experience — is the earlier block of direct patient-care practice, integrated through the pre-APPE curriculum. APPE — the Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience — is the sustained, full-time rotation block near the end of the program, made up of individual rotations each long enough to build proficiency.

CCAPP [2] uses the term practice experiences, and divides them into an introductory phase and a concluding (advanced) phase near the end of the program. The introductory phase involves direct patient-care placement and may be supplemented with other forms of experiential learning; the concluding phase is a sustained period of advanced, full-time practice.

Different words, same skeleton: a required total number of hours, a required range of settings, qualified preceptors and sites, an assessment at each stage, and a connection back to program outcomes. If you can organize evidence for one, you can organize it for the other — you're just filling the same buckets with different labels.

What the Hours Require — and What Reviewers Actually Check

Here are the numbers, so the section has a floor to work from.

Under ACPE (Standards 2025, effective July 1, 2025): [1]

• IPPE of at least 300 clock hours, including at least 75 patient-care hours in each of the community and the hospital/health-system settings (the remaining 150 hours may be in a variety of pharmacy practice settings). Simulated practice does not count toward the 300.
• APPE of at least 36 weeks (1,440 hours), with each individual rotation of at least 160 hours.
• APPEs follow successful completion of all IPPE and the required didactic curriculum.
• Required APPE rotations across four practice settings — community pharmacy, ambulatory care, hospital/health-system pharmacy, and inpatient adult patient care — with the majority involving interprofessional communication and collaboration.
• A student-to-preceptor ratio that keeps supervision individualized: in most situations, ratios for IPPEs and APPEs do not exceed 2:1.

Under CCAPP (Pharm.D. accreditation standards, 2023 revised edition): [2]

• A total of at least 40 weeks (1,600 hours) of practice experiences.
• Introductory practice experiences of at least 320 hours (8 weeks) in direct patient-care placement, which may be supplemented with volunteer, service-learning, or other experiential activity.
• Concluding (advanced) practice experiences of at least 32 weeks (1,280 hours) near the end of the program, of which at least 24 weeks (960 hours) is full-time direct patient-care practice in both primary care and acute care, which includes care delivered in a hospital, long-term-care unit, or ambulatory care clinic (a long-term-care placement does not count if no acute care is taking place).

The hours are the floor, not the whole picture. The standards pair every hour requirement with quality criteria around it: how preceptors and sites are selected, oriented, and evaluated; how students are assigned; and how readiness is confirmed at each stage. That's where the evidence gets specific — and where a thin section shows up on the visit.

The Evidence Behind Each Element

Here's the breakdown, because it's the same shape under either body. Each element of the experiential program needs its own set of documents, and each set is easy to miss until a reviewer asks for it.

• The hours. Course outlines that specify the required hours for each phase, plus the rotation schedules or logs that show the hours were actually delivered.
• The settings and breadth. An overview of your practice sites — which provide primary care, acute care, long-term care, or rural and urban settings — and a description of how students are assigned to them.
• The preceptors. Your criteria for selecting preceptors, the orientation they receive, any ongoing development, and the criteria and process you use to evaluate them.
• The sites. The criteria and process for evaluating practice sites, and how you handle a site that stops meeting them.
• Student assessment. How you confirm a student's readiness at the end of each experience — the assessment methods, the professional activities completed, and any limits on activities set by law, regulation, or practice standards.
• The mapping. How the learning outcomes of the experiences connect to your program-level outcomes and competencies. This is the thread that turns a list of rotations into evidence that the program produces the graduate it claims to.

Notice the last item. It's the one that's easiest to leave out of a first draft, because it's not a document you can point to — it's a relationship. And it's the one a reviewer will test hardest, because it's what proves the experiential program is doing its job rather than just filling hours.

Where the Gaps Hide

Three patterns are easy to fall into in this section, and none of them are about the standards themselves:

• The scattered site files. The hours check out, but the agreements, orientation records, and evaluations live across a dozen emails, a shared drive, and a folder that only one person knows how to navigate. When the team asks for the preceptor file behind a specific rotation, it's a hunt.
• The mapping in someone's head. The connection between a rotation and an outcome is obvious to the faculty member who designed it — and invisible to everyone else. When that person leaves, the map goes with them, and the next cycle re-derives it from scratch.
• The criteria on paper, the practice in the folder. You have a written preceptor-evaluation process. The actual evaluations, though, are inconsistent — some rotations have a completed form, others don't, and the criteria applied vary. A reviewer who samples a few rotations will see the gap immediately.

Keeping It Connected

Ready isn't a folder of PDFs. It's a state you can check at any time: for each element of the experiential program, you can see the hours, the settings, the preceptors, the assessments — and how the experience connects to your program's outcomes — without opening a dozen files.

That's the difference between a map and a hunt. One connected view, where you can start from any rotation, site, or outcome and follow the connections from there. So the evidence behind your experiential program isn't something you assemble in the weeks before the visit — it's something you've kept connected all along, from course to outcome to the document that proves it.

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 (2023 Revised)," CCAPP, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://ccapp.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/April10-2025_CCAPP-PharmD-Standards_ENG.pdf