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ARC-PA 6th Edition Is Here: How PA Programs Can Stay Always Accreditation-Ready

Posted at h in All, Physician Assistant by
The implementation of the ARC-PA 6th Edition reflects a refinement–not a reinvention–of how Physician Assistant (PA) programs are expected to approach ongoing self-assessment, documentation, and accreditation readiness. Under the updated standards, programs are expected not only to maintain a high-quality educational environment but to demonstrate—at any point in time—a systematic, continuous evaluation of curriculum effectiveness, student performance, and program outcomes. While the 6th Edition no longer includes the structured Appendix 14 template used in the previous Self-Study Report (SSR), the evaluative responsibilities it once organized are now embedded across the C-standards, including C1.01 and other program evaluation requirements.

The realities emerging at the PAEA Education Forum

Discussions with program directors and faculty members at the PAEA Education Forum, as well as broader insights from PAEA’s work on supporting excellence in PA education and understanding members’ needs, highlight a clear theme: programs are increasingly strained by the administrative and analytic workload required to maintain PA program accreditation and respond to evolving standards.
Leaders described the substantial time investment required to prepare for PA school accreditation reviews and internal evaluations. Common examples include:
  • Extracting and restructuring data from PAEA End of Rotation® (EoR), End of Curriculum® (EoC), PACKRAT®, and PANCE® reports, often exported in formats that require significant manual cleanup before they can be analyzed.
  • Converting qualitative student feedback into codified, analyzable themes, which typically involves reading hundreds of comments across multiple courses and clinical sites.
  • Matching student records across disparate systems, such as clinical scheduling platforms, LMS gradebooks, and assessment repositories, to build a coherent performance profile.
  • Reconciling LMS, ExamSoft, experiential learning management systems, and evaluation data to create a comprehensive view of student performance, course effectiveness, and progression through the curriculum.
These activities are essential for PA school accreditation, but they often compete with higher-value academic work—such as reflective curriculum review, strategic assessment planning, and faculty-led quality improvement. The result is a structural tension: faculty and program directors are asked to do more with the same or fewer resources, even as the burden of documentation grows.
This tension becomes especially visible when programs try to align their processes with the expectations of the ARC-PA 6th Edition, which—like the previous edition—maintains a strong emphasis on continuity, integration, and transparent documentation for ARC-PA accreditation.

What ARC-PA 6th Edition actually require

The ARC-PA 6th Edition reinforces the Commission’s expectations around continuous self-assessment and evidence-based decision-making. Rather than relying on episodic or pre–site visit data pulls, programs must demonstrate that their evaluation systems operate consistently throughout the academic year. This involves:
  • Routinely refreshed data collection from learning management systems, evaluation platforms, assessment systems, and remediation records.
  • Integration of multiple data sources—including student evaluations, didactic course grades, remediation reports, and curricular assessment indicators—to form a multi-dimensional view of program performance.
  • Analysis of relationships among data points, such as how course performance aligns with student perceptions, remediation needs, or curricular design.
  • Documented action planning that ties each decision to specific evidence and articulates measurable goals, responsible parties, and follow-up timelines.
  • Demonstrated continuous quality improvement (CQI) through ongoing review and implementation of improvement initiatives.
Under the 5th Edition, Appendix 14 served as a structured tool for compiling these types of evidence. In the 6th Edition, however, programs demonstrate this same work through their ongoing self-assessment processes—reinforcing the expectation that continuous evaluation is part of everyday program operations, not a single reporting exercise.

A structured ongoing assessment framework

To align with the expectations of the ARC-PA 6th Edition and to sustainably support PA program accreditation, many programs are adopting a structured, ongoing assessment framework that shifts evaluation from reactive reporting to proactive, sustained quality improvement. This framework comprises three interrelated components:
1. Systematic data collection
Programs begin by identifying the data indicators that best align with their benchmarks, program goals, and applicable standards. They then standardize and, where possible, automate collection. This approach not only improves accuracy but also reduces duplication of effort and the risk of fragmented or incomplete datasets.
2. Intentional analysis & insight generation
Data alone is insufficient. Programs require meaningful visualizations and longitudinal perspectives that enable faculty and leadership to understand patterns, identify areas of strength, and detect emerging concerns. Effective analysis integrates both quantitative and qualitative sources and supports questions such as:
  • Are we meeting our defined benchmarks across courses and cohorts?
  • What trends are emerging in student satisfaction, remediation, or outcomes?
  • How do student experiences align with performance data and curricular design?
3. Strategic action planning
Analysis must lead to action. Strategic action plans document how the program will respond to its findings, what changes will be made, who is responsible, and how outcomes will be evaluated. This is essential not only for CQI, but also for demonstrating alignment with the intent of the ARC-PA 6th Edition standards and related guidance documents, such as the ARC-PA Compliance Manual.
Together, these components provide a sustainable foundation for continuous readiness and more resilient PA school accreditation processes.
Discover the ways to be always ready for self assessment and PA program accreditation

Achieving continuous readiness: lessons from UT Health San Antonio

UT Health San Antonio’s PA program offers a clear case study of how a program can transition from reactive to proactive self-assessment. As shared in our on-demand webinar, “How Leading PA Programs Master Continuous Self-Assessment”, the program previously experienced a highly manual and stressful approach to accreditation preparation, characterized by long workdays reconciling data and reconstructing narratives of program performance.
By implementing a centralized, automated evaluation and analytics system, their team transformed both the efficiency and the rigor of their processes:
  • Course effectiveness metrics, student evaluation results, and performance indicators are refreshed on an ongoing basis rather than being compiled only at major milestones.
  • Program committees interact with Enflux dashboards instead of fragmented spreadsheets, enabling more focused, data-informed discussions.
  • Action plans and quality improvement activities are documented in real time, rather than reconstructed retrospectively.
  • Preparation for self-study and accreditation reports shifted from “building evidence from scratch” to synthesizing and contextualizing existing artifacts.
This shift did not merely make life easier for faculty; it materially strengthened the program’s ability to demonstrate alignment with ARC-PA accreditation expectations and the broader principles of continuous improvement that underlie PA program accreditation.

How Enflux and CompetencyGenie™ support 6th Edition compliance

Enflux, through its ARC-PA Monitoring Suite, and CompetencyGenie™, an AI-powered assessment tagging tool, help PA programs operationalize the expectations of the ARC-PA 6th Edition by supporting every stage of ongoing self-assessment. Together, these solutions provide a structured, sustainable approach to data collection, analysis, interpretation, and continuous quality improvement.
1. Data collection
Enflux organizes siloed data sources—including student evaluations, course outcomes, remediation records, EoR®, EoC®, PACKRAT®, and PANCE® results—into a unified platform. This eliminates fragmented reporting and ensures programs have a reliable evidence base for continuous self-assessment and accreditation monitoring.
2. Curriculum mapping & effectiveness analysis
CompetencyGenie™ automates ExamSoft item tagging to the PANCE blueprint, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and competency frameworks, providing the detailed alignment needed to evaluate curricular coverage and depth. Enflux then maps this assessment data back to courses, modules, competencies, and learning outcomes—giving programs a clear picture of curriculum effectiveness. The platform highlights where competencies are over- or under-represented, identifies gaps in instructional sequencing, and surfaces patterns in student performance that may signal curricular strengths or areas requiring revision. These insights directly support ARC-PA’s expectations for systematic curriculum evaluation and verification that instructional content prepares students for supervised clinical practice and professional responsibilities.
3. Conclusions
With integrated dashboards and longitudinal views, faculty and Program Directors can interpret findings quickly and accurately. Enflux supports timely, informed decisions for Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) by making strengths, gaps, and emerging patterns transparent and easy to understand.
4. Action plans
Enflux enables programs to translate conclusions into actionable, trackable improvement plans through its ActionPlan® Management System. Within the platform, teams can document interventions, assign responsibilities, monitor progress, and link each initiative directly to accreditation standards—providing clear evidence of intentional, continuous improvement.
Together, Enflux and CompetencyGenie™ reduce manual work, strengthen curriculum assessment, academic decision-making, and provide the infrastructure needed for sustainable alignment with the ARC-PA 6th Edition.
navigate ARC-PA 6th Edition and SSR C1.01 - C1.03 requirements using ongoing assessment systems and Enflux

A sustainable path toward accreditation confidence

For PA programs navigating the requirements of the ARC-PA 6th Edition, the central challenge is not simply “checking the box” for a single review cycle. It is building the systems, habits, and evidence base that support continuous readiness and long-term excellence in PA school accreditation.
Programs that implement a structured, technology-supported assessment framework gain:
  • Clear visibility into meaningful trends and performance indicators
  • Continuous documentation that supports SSR Template Requirements and related standards
  • Reduced manual workload and lower risk of data fragmentation
  • Stronger faculty engagement in analysis and decision-making
  • Greater confidence heading into both internal reviews and formal PA program accreditation evaluations
To support programs in this process, Enflux offers a Complimentary Accreditation Confidence Assessment—a 45-minute evaluation designed to identify strengths, surface gaps, and outline practical next steps for building a sustainable system of ongoing self-assessment aligned with the ARC-PA 6th Edition.