Bethel College's PA Training Program is located in McKenzie, TN. The Program Director is Thomas Brown, MD and the Clinical Director is Johnna Tanner. The program currently has 24 enrolled students in their clinical year.

Bethel College's PA Training program graduated its first class in 2003. Their initial pass rate for the PANCE for the Class of 2003 was 63%. Bethel's program has only three full time faculty members. Over the course of the ensuing years, the program struggled to improve their certification pass rate.

Bethel purchased CPPAT™ as a way to help the students in the Class of 2005 prepare for PANCE, but they assigned it only as a self-study tool and did not monitor student activity on the system. There were also no standardized methods for creating assessment tests for the students. The first time pass rate on the PANCE for these students was 76%.

In July 2006, Bethel hired Dr. Brown as Interim Program Director. Dr. Brown began preparing to update Bethel's curriculum and seek additional faculty. However, he recognized that he could not get all of his planned changes implemented for the graduating class of 2007. Dr. Brown contacted Challenger and we began working together to create a system to require Bethel's clinical year students to complete the Med-Challenger FMPA module as part of their training.

Bethel began assigning Challenger content to their students as part of each clinical rotation. Every three weeks, the students would be assigned an exam by rotation topic. In April, before their May graduation, the students were assigned to finish any portions of Med-Challenger FMPA that had not been included in their rotation assignments. For the Class of 2007, 21 of Bethel's 24 students passed the PANCE exam on their initial attempt, bringing their initial certification rate to a much improved 88%. Their scores on the PANCE exam were also expected to be well above the national average. Of the remaining three students who did not pass on their initial attempt, all three passed the PANCE within four months on their second attempt.

Dr. Brown calls the improvement from a board pass rate of 71% in 2006 to 100% in 2007 a "miracle". He credits most of the improvement to the use of CPPAT™ since the other faculty and curricular changes that he has put into place for the Class of 2008 were not in effect for the Class of 2007. "Med-Challenger has made a huge difference," says Dr. Brown. "It got students familiar with the testing process and made it possible for the program to identify students' strengths and weaknesses quickly and focus our didactics to areas of weakness."

Dr. Brown has been tracking results in the CPPAT™ system and says that he "fully anticipates that the Class of 2008 will pass (the PANCE) the first time." He is also making plans to expand the use of CPPAT™ at Bethel. He will be working with his colleagues to use questions from CPPAT™ to create test banks for students in their didactic year, thereby linking content in the didactic and clinical years. He will also be taking more advantage of Challenger's integrated reporting system to get more detailed results of student performance and assign remediation in problem areas. Dr. Brown is also considering expanding Bethel's CPPAT™ platform to include the Premium Reporting Package, which would allow him to track comparative results of his students versus other PA Training students using CPPAT™.