(212) Assessing the effects of exam review attendance on academic performance in first-year pharmacy students

Objective : To determine if exam review session attendance affects first-year students' academic performance.

Methods: All first-year students (n=99) enrolled in the Doctor of Pharmacy program are provided the opportunity to review their composite exam performance with rationale in a controlled setting. Composite exams occur every two weeks and contain specific questions from various courses compiled into a singular exam. The exam review process was revised, including answer rationale, beginning in Fall 2022. Academic performance data and the number of exam review sessions attended were collected. Student demographics, including age and race/ethnicity, were also collected. Fall term and exam-specific GPAs were compared with the number of review sessions attended using independent samples t-tests. A p-value of 0.05 was deemed significant.

Results: In fall 2022, 90.9% (n=91) of first-year pharmacy students attended one or more exam reviews, 61.6% (n=61) attended less than 50% of the reviews, and 38.3% (n=38) attended more than 50% of them. The mean number of sessions attended was 3.9 (SD 1.9). Students who attended more than 50% of the exam reviews had a significantly greater fall term GPA (mean 3.50, SD 0.44) than those who attended less (mean 3.13, SD 0.73) [p=.002]. For the exam-specific courses, students who attended 50% or more of the sessions had a significantly higher exam-specific GPA (mean 3.34, SD 0.57) than those who attended less frequently (mean 2.89, SD 0.90) [p=.001].

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that students who attend more exam review sessions with rationales demonstrate better course performance and term GPAs. Future research is needed to analyze the impact of continued attendance at future exam review sessions throughout the didactic curriculum.