Where can I see each school's licensing exam pass rates?

Whether a program's graduates go on to pass their licensing exam is exactly the kind of thing worth checking before committing years and tuition to a school — and the honest answer depends on looking at more than one semester's number, because a handful of test-takers can make a rate swing wildly from year to year.

Where the numbers actually come from: every pass rate ultimately traces back to the California Acupuncture Board's own published exam statistics for the CALE (California Acupuncture Licensing Exam) — that's the primary source, and any school's number should be checkable against it.

A multi-year comparison already exists: Five Branches has aggregated Northern California schools' CALE first-time pass rates from 2021–2025 into one report — CALE Pass Rates: Northern California TCM Schools, 2021–2025, last checked 08/2026. It groups schools by cohort size specifically so a 40-person program isn't compared apples-to-apples with a 2-person one. A few examples from it:

The right-hand column only means as much as the left-hand one — a rate built on dozens of test-takers a year is a much steadier signal than one built on two or three.

A couple of honest caveats: any single semester's number (the kind schools often print in their own catalogs) can swing sharply on a small cohort, so lean on the multi-year figure where it's available. And CALE is California-specific — if you're weighing a school outside California, you'd want that state's own board statistics, or the national NCBAHM (formerly NCCAOM) exam data, instead.

Are you comparing schools within Northern California, or looking at pass rates somewhere else?