February 23, 2026 | Alexander Klancko

The UConn Pharmacy Students Exceed National Average for the 2025 NAPLEX

The UConn School of Pharmacy scores for the North American Pharmacist Licensure Examination, otherwise known as NAPLEX, were announced and UConn School of Pharmacy had the highest pass rate in New England.

Exterior of the School of Pharmacy Building

School of Pharmacy Building on April 19, 2024. (Sean Flynn/UConn Photo)

The NAPLEX test is an important test for UConn School of Pharmacy students as it determines whether or not they become licensed pharmacists.

The NAPLEX is normally taken the summer after students graduate with their Pharm.D. degrees. Recently, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) published their report for first-time pass rates for the NAPLEX for the Class of 2025.  Just like the Class of 2024, the UConn School of Pharmacy has exceeded the national average for first time pass-rate.

For the 2025 NAPLEX, the first-time pass rate for the UConn School of Pharmacy was 94.3%, putting UConn into the top 20 universities, while the national average was 86.8%. Compared to last year, the UConn School of Pharmacy’s first-time pass rate increased from 84% to 94%, a jump of 10%.

The Director of Assessment for the School of Pharmacy, Diana Sobieraj, said that UConn’s first-time pass rate shows that they prepare their students for the NAPLEX.

“Having a higher pass rate than the national implies a programmatic strength of ours in preparing students to be successful in this licensure exam,” Sobieraj said.

Sobieraj added that the School of Pharmacy pays attention to the first-time pass rate as one measure of the quality of their professional program.

Sobieraj also mentioned that the School of Pharmacy evaluates the professional curriculum in comparison to the NAPLEX topics, through continuous quality improvement, and may modify the curriculum if needed.

“We do our best to ensure that we have sufficient coverage and alignment with those topics within the curriculum, so our graduates are prepared to successfully pass the NAPLEX and enter the profession,” Sobieraj said.

The professional curriculum was recently revised, and some of the enhancements target strengthening performance in specific NAPLEX topics. “We recognized opportunities to improve performance in clinical reasoning and problem-solving areas on the exam, and we made specific changes to the series of courses in the curriculum that focus on these skills,” Sobieraj said.

Sobieraj added that one of the content areas UConn School of Pharmacy students thrived in for the NAPLEX was math.

“Our students regularly as a group performed above the national competence in this area and pharmacy math nationally was a struggle for many programs,” Sobieraj said. “We recognized that our math curriculum was strong and so this content wasn’t revised in our new curriculum.”

The 2025 NAPLEX test was the first of the new test content outline, and the UConn School of Pharmacy will continue to build off of a successful first year.