BCBA Exam Pass Rates by University Program

The BCBA exam first-time pass rate was 51% in 2025 — the lowest figure in the series the BACB publishes, and nine points below 2021. Retake candidates passed at 23%. In the same year, more people sat retakes (13,196) than sat the exam for the first time (9,955).

That national picture is the context for any question about a specific university. The program-level data exists, the BACB publishes it, and it is genuinely useful — but it is much noisier than a table of percentages suggests, and the BACB says so itself.

The national trend

From the historical results tables on the BACB’s examination information page:

BCBA exam	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
First-time candidates	12,107	7,179	8,255	9,911	9,955
First-time pass rate	60%	55%	56%	54%	51%
Retake candidates	11,301	8,575	10,450	11,780	13,196
Retake pass rate	28%	24%	23%	25%	23%

The BCaBA exam runs on much smaller volumes and moved the other way in 2025:

BCaBA exam	2021	2022	2023	2024	2025
First-time candidates	2,130	1,190	931	1,011	1,196
First-time pass rate	61%	49%	56%	54%	60%
Retake pass rate	32%	25%	25%	22%	30%

One structural note the BACB provides on the same page: the passing score is set by the modified Angoff method, which is criterion-referenced. “Your performance on the examination is not dependent on the performance of those taking the examination with you.” A falling pass rate therefore reflects candidate performance against a fixed standard, not a curve that got harder to beat. New base forms are created roughly every five years or when content changes significantly; the current exam has been based on the Test Content Outline (6th ed.) since January 1, 2025.

What the university-level report actually is

The BACB publishes program-level data on its University Examination Pass Rates page. As of August 6, 2026, the most recent BCBA report covers 2024 and carries an internal date of “Updated 12/2025.” No 2025 university report was available at that date; the page’s most recent entry is “2024 BCBA and BCaBA Examination Pass Rates.”

The 2024 BCBA report covers ABAI-accredited degree programs and Verified Course Sequences. Its scope rule is explicit: “Data are not reported for training programs with fewer than six first-time candidates in 2024.”

Counting the entries in that report:

2024 BCBA university report	Value
Program entries listed	160
First-time candidates covered	7,157
Share of all 2024 first-time candidates (9,911)	about 72%
Median cohort size per program	13
Programs with 10 or fewer first-time candidates	63
Programs with 100 or more first-time candidates	7
Entries combining 2023 and 2024 data due to low volume	18
Range of reported pass rates	0% to 100%
Median program pass rate	60.5%

About 28% of first-time candidates in 2024 — 2,754 people — are not represented in the report at all, because their program fell under the six-candidate floor or their coursework spanned multiple course sequences.

The distribution

Reported 2024 pass rates spread across the whole range:

Reported pass rate	Number of program entries
Below 50%	48
50–69%	56
70–89%	40
90% or above	16

Eleven entries reported 100%. Every one of those is a small cohort — the median cohort in this report is 13 candidates, so a 100% result is frequently a group of six to fifteen people all passing in the same year.

The weighted average across the 160 reported entries works out to about 54%, which is consistent with the BACB’s published overall 2024 first-time rate of 54%.

Why single-year program rates are weak evidence

The BACB attaches its own interpretation guidance to the report, and it is worth reading before drawing conclusions:

“When using the reports, we suggest that you evaluate each program’s pass rate on its own in terms of the likelihood of its graduates passing the examination on their first attempt (e.g., a 60% pass rate would roughly indicate a 3-in-5 chance of passing). We recommend that you do not compare a training program’s pass rate with the overall examination pass rate, as the overall pass rate is impacted by several large programs.”

Three specific reasons the numbers move for reasons unrelated to teaching quality:

Cohort size. With a median of 13 candidates, a single additional pass or fail swings a program’s rate by roughly 8 percentage points. At the 63 programs with 10 or fewer candidates, one person is worth 10 points or more. A program that reports 45% one year and 70% the next may not have changed anything.

Who is counted, and when. The BACB’s FAQ notes that “the data represent those who took the examination for the first time in the year, which might include individuals who applied for certification and potentially graduated or completed the program before that year.” A 2024 figure can include people who finished their coursework in 2021.

How candidates are assigned to programs. Assignment relies on what candidates report on their application. Per the BACB, “only data from those who completed all of their coursework in one VCS or those who completed coursework across 4th and 5th edition VCSs that will be combined will be included.” Candidates who assembled coursework across multiple sequences drop out of the program-level data entirely.

The report also mixes delivery models — on campus, online, and hybrid — and includes non-US programs whose candidates may sit the exam in a second language. Two entries in the 2024 report belong to a single Spanish institution.

How to use the data anyway

It is still the best public signal available, if you use it as a floor rather than a ranking.

Read the rate as a probability for a graduate of that program, exactly as the BACB frames it: 60% means roughly a 3-in-5 chance of passing first time. Then check the candidate count in the same row — a rate attached to 8 candidates carries much less information than the same rate attached to 300. Where a program appears in several consecutive years’ reports, look at the pattern rather than any single year; the 2019 through 2024 reports are all archived on the same page. And treat an entry marked with an asterisk carefully, since it combines two years of candidates to clear the reporting threshold.

What the data cannot tell you is why a rate is what it is. The BACB does not publish domain-level scores or breakdowns by graduation year — asked directly about more granular data, it says “these data are not available at present.”

One change coming to this dataset

The report is built on ABAI Verified Course Sequences and accredited programs. The BACB’s February 2026 Newsletter refers to “the discontinuation of the Verified Course Sequence (VCS) system by the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI).” From January 1, 2026, pathway 2 applications instead require a Coursework Attestation completed by a designated program contact, per the BACB’s Recent & Upcoming Changes table. How that affects the structure of future university pass-rate reports has not been described in a BACB document we could locate, so we are not going to speculate about it here.

Sources

All figures above come from the BACB directly: the examination information page for national trends, the University Examination Pass Rates page for methodology and interpretation guidance, and the 2024 BCBA report for program-level counts. We deliberately do not name individual programs or their rates. The BACB publishes that file openly, and readers evaluating a specific program should read the row for that program in the original.