The worldwide pandemic and crisis within the United States continues to challenge all of us as we work to get candidates through the NPTE scheduling and testing process. There are several key things candidates face when trying to schedule appointments:

1. Prometric site closures. Prometric is opening as many centers as it safely and legally can but there are many sites that will not open on May 1. This list will change as Prometric is able to open sites in more areas.

Information on when centers will open changes on a daily basis. 

In some cases, it means that candidates who have appointments will have those appointments canceled due to closures. In other cases, it means new appointments will become available as centers open throughout the month. 

Many candidate appointments will be fine as scheduled. As we get the information from Prometric on cancellations, we will communicate directly with the affected candidates beginning this week.

2. Social distancing within Prometric test centers. For the centers that are open they are operating at 50 percent capacity in order to maintain social distancing. 

3. Lack of visibility as to where seats are available. In this constantly evolving situation, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of information available on Prometric’s website to help candidates find available appointments. We continue to work with Prometric on how we can share this information and make things easier for our candidates. 

4. Changing government orders. Local government stay-at-home and shelter-in-place orders, in addition to statewide executive orders by many governors, are continuing to be revised, which leads to the fluctuation in test center availability.

FSBPT understands how important it is for candidates and others to have sufficient information on these issues and, more importantly, to have these issues resolved.

We are working diligently with Prometric on resolutions for May and we are getting ahead of issues that may arise in July. We know that while social distancing measures will still be in place in July, there will be more seats available for NPTE candidates since we have thousands of reserved seats on our fixed dates. In addition to July 8 for PTAs and July 28 and 29 for PTs, we will be adding testing windows to accommodate candidates who cannot find a seat on the fixed dates. If candidates switch to a July exam, we will send them additional information when we have established the dates for the testing windows.

It is our goal to communicate with all stakeholders about issues in a timely, open, and honest manner. If you would like to discuss our communication efforts, please email us.