KAPS was retired, not paused: the last sitting was in November and OPRA began the following March

The Knowledge Assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences exam no longer runs. The Australian Pharmacy Council announced its retirement itself, in an announcement dated 31 July 2024, and gave both dates in one sentence:

“The last KAPS exam will be held in November 2024, with the OPRA™ exam beginning in March 2025.”

There is no transition period, no parallel schedule and no final grandfathered sitting after that. If you are waiting for a KAPS date, there isn’t one.

What replaced it is the Overseas Pharmacist Readiness Assessment. APC’s own framing is that this was a redesign of the same exam rather than the insertion of a different requirement — the announcement is headed “APC announces re-designed KAPS exam” and describes “a redesign of the Knowledge Assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences (KAPS) exam, replacing it with the Overseas Pharmacist Readiness Assessment (OPRA™) exam”.

What did not change

APC put this in a single sentence, and it is the most reassuring line in the whole announcement for anyone mid-process:

“There is no change to the candidate eligibility process and registration process, or validity period of results.”

So the Knowledge Stream eligibility check, the documents it requires, the way you register, and how long a result stays good were all carried across. The exam changed. The pathway around it did not.

The position of the exam in the journey also did not change. It remains the step that leads to provisional registration and an internship, not to general registration — APC describes OPRA as “an important step in the process of provisional registration as a pharmacist in Australia.” What follows is set out in the intern year requirement for overseas-qualified pharmacists.

What did change

The announcement lists three things: “Key changes of the redesign are to the methodology that APC uses for the selection and scoring of questions, a revision of the content areas, and a reduced exam duration.”

Scoring methodology. APC moved OPRA onto the Rasch model, which it says it had already been using “to select and score questions for the Intern Written and CAOP exam since 2020”. In APC’s words, the purpose was “aligning our exam products and providing a shorter, more targeted assessment”.

Content areas. “The exam now has a stronger focus on therapeutics and the application of knowledge to align with evolving pharmacy practice within Australia.” That is a shift in emphasis away from recall of pharmaceutical science toward applying it — the single most consequential change for anyone preparing from old material.

Length and structure. “These changes have enabled APC to reduce the exam to a single paper.” KAPS was not a single paper; OPRA is. Any preparation plan built around sitting two papers is describing the retired exam.

What OPRA looks like now

From APC’s current Knowledge Stream page rather than from the announcement:

“The Overseas Pharmacist Readiness Assessment (OPRA®) exam assesses whether candidates have the necessary knowledge and understanding of the biomedical, pharmaceutical, and clinical sciences underlying the practice of pharmacy in Australia.”

“Duration of exam: 2.5 hours, 120 questions in total.”

It is computer-delivered multiple choice, sat at test centres in a long list of countries that APC publishes on the same page — Australian capitals plus centres across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas — so unlike the nursing OSCE it does not require travel to Australia.

Resits are unlimited. APC states plainly: “You may re-sit as many times as you need to.” That is a real difference from the other exam APC runs for overseas pharmacists: for CAOP, “You have 2 attempts at the CAOP® exam. If you are unsuccessful the second time, you’ll need to go through the Knowledge Stream process to receive your Skills Assessment outcome.”

APC releases no scores and gives no feedback: “APC cannot comment on your performance nor provide feedback to candidates” and “APC does not provide exam scores to candidates.”

The price moved after the announcement

The announcement quoted a figure: “The cost of the OPRA™ exam will be AU$2190. This is a reduction from the current KAPS exam cost.”

That figure is now out of date. APC’s current Knowledge Stream page lists exam registration at $2,245, alongside an eligibility check at $810 and a Skills Assessment Outcome at $300. We are quoting the current page rather than the announcement because fees change and the announcement was written in 2024. Check the page on the day you pay; do not budget from either number in a third-party guide.

Why the old name keeps appearing, and why that is not a transition period

This is the part that generates most of the confusion, because the stale references are on official sites rather than agent blogs.

APC’s own governing document still names KAPS. APC’s Assessment Standards — the document it describes as specifying “the Assessment Criteria that candidates must meet to be eligible for a skills assessment letter or pathway to registration as a pharmacist in Australia” — defines the Knowledge Stream as a two-part pathway ending in “Passing the KAPS (Knowledge Assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences) exams”, plural, and carries KAPS in its abbreviations list. The PDF’s cover is dated January 2024, version 1.4, which predates the change. (APC’s resources page labels the same document 17 May 2023, version 1.3 — its own metadata and the file disagree.) The document has not been reissued to match the current pathway pages.

The Pharmacy Board’s pathway diagram names both. On the Board’s Internships page, reviewed 25 November 2025, the diagram step for overseas-qualified pharmacists reads: “Pass the Overseas Pharmacist Readiness Assessment (OPRA®) exam or Knowledge Assessment of Pharmaceutical Sciences (KAPS) exam conducted by the Australian Pharmacy Council”. That is consistent with APC’s statement that the validity period of results did not change — a KAPS pass obtained before the exam was retired still does its job. It is not an offer of a KAPS sitting.

APC’s URLs still say KAPS. The page that routes candidates between the two exams lives at a path containing “kaps”, and its title is “I want to sit the CAOP® or OPRA® exam”. The address is legacy; the content is current.

None of these is evidence that KAPS is still available. Two are historical artefacts and one is a deliberate recognition of past passes. The only statement about availability is APC’s own, and it gives November 2024 as the end.

The other exam, so you know which one you are reading about

APC runs both OPRA and CAOP for overseas-trained pharmacists, and which one applies to you is decided by where you qualified rather than by how well you did.

• CAOP — the Competency Assessment of Overseas Pharmacists — belongs to the Competency Stream, for people who qualified in Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom or the United States. APC: it “tests your competency to practise pharmacy in an Australian setting”, runs 2 hours with 70 questions, and leads toward limited registration.
• OPRA belongs to the Knowledge Stream, for people who qualified anywhere else, runs 2.5 hours with 120 questions, and leads toward provisional registration and a full internship.

The division between them, and what each stream demands of the degree itself, is covered in how an overseas pharmacy degree is measured against APC’s accredited-degree standard.

A third exam, the Intern Written Exam, sits at the end of the internship and is not part of either overseas stream’s entry.

Confusingly, APC also delivers exams under the same two names for other regulators — CAOP and OPRA on behalf of the Pharmacy Council of New Zealand, and CAOP for Fiji. Same names, different regulators, different pathways. If a page or a study guide refers to “the NZ OPRA exam”, it is not describing the Australian route.

What to do with this

1. Check the publication date of anything you are studying from. Material written for a two-paper exam with a stronger pure-science weighting is describing KAPS.
2. Use APC’s published OPRA exam guide and sample content, which APC produced specifically for the new exam, rather than reused KAPS material.
3. Take fees from APC’s Knowledge Stream page on the day, not from the 2024 announcement and not from third-party summaries.
4. If you passed KAPS before it was retired, you are not required to sit OPRA — but confirm the current validity of your result with APC and the Pharmacy Board directly rather than relying on this page.
5. Do not send documents or payments outside APC’s candidate portal. APC publishes a scam warning on the Knowledge Stream page itself and states that “The only way to apply for an eligibility check or to book an exam is via the candidate portal on the APC website.”

This site summarises published rules. It is not the Australian Pharmacy Council or the Pharmacy Board of Australia, it does not deliver or mark exams, and nothing here predicts a result or the outcome of any application. A Skills Assessment Outcome supports a visa application but is not one — APC notes that “The Department of Home Affairs sets the validity period for your Skills Assessment outcome for visa applications”, so for anything visa-shaped go to the Department of Home Affairs or a registered migration agent.