This guide explains the Maine MPJE as NABP and the Maine Board of Pharmacy publish it — the exam’s format and pass/fail scoring, its four competency areas, its fees and attempt rules, the Maine law it is answered under, and the March 2027 blueprint change — and how the PassProfessor program maps onto each part.
Format and scoring
The examination presents 120 multiple-choice questions over 2.5 hours at a Pearson VUE test center: 100 scored questions and 20 unscored pretest questions mixed in indistinguishably. Federal and Maine questions are intermixed with no distinction made between them — you answer each question under the prevailing law of Maine, so where a Maine rule differs from the federal rule, the Maine rule decides. The result is pass/fail: NABP reports the outcome against its passing standard and does not publish a raw passing score, so no percentage of correct answers can be stated as the passing standard — which is why this program scores practice against a 70% benchmark and labels it as a benchmark. Maine law adds no numeric passing score of its own: the Pharmacy Act names no examination, and the Board of Pharmacy retains sole discretion for determining who has passed the examinations it approves. You may attempt the MPJE up to 5 times per jurisdiction, NABP fees run about $270 per attempt, and for Maine, NABP confirms your eligibility. MPJE scores are not transferable to other jurisdictions.
The four competency areas
NABP’s current MPJE Competency Statements divide the exam into four areas — and the program mirrors that division exactly:
- Licensure and Personnel — 333 practice questions; 22 per full practice exam
- Pharmacist Practice — 498 practice questions; 33 per full practice exam
- Dispensing Requirements — 358 practice questions; 24 per full practice exam
- Pharmacy Operations — 311 practice questions; 21 per full practice exam
The Maine pharmacy law behind the exam
- The Maine questions in this bank are grounded in primary Maine sources read first-hand: the Maine Pharmacy Act (Title 32, chapter 117), the Board of Pharmacy rules (02-392 CMR), the OPOR framework statutes (Title 10), the prescription monitoring program statute (Title 22, chapter 1603) and the Department of Health and Human Services monitoring rule, the criminal drug schedules (Title 17-A), and the codified fee rule (02-041 CMR chapter 10). Maine’s rulebook holds traps that older study materials miss: pharmacy technicians are licensed rather than registered under the Board’s current rules, effective January 1, 2025, and pharmacy interns are licensed too; the old endorsement section and the good-character qualification are repealed; and the monitoring program’s reportable-item list moved out of the statute and into rule in 2025. This bank keys on current law throughout, including those changes.
- Maine’s prescription monitoring program is the first trap, because almost everything familiar about it sits somewhere unexpected. The program — the Controlled Substances Prescription Monitoring Program — lives in Title 22, chapter 1603, not in the Pharmacy Act, and the Department of Health and Human Services administers it, not the Board of Pharmacy. The statute sets no reporting deadline at all: dispensers report no later than the close of business on the next business day after dispensing because the Department’s rule requires it, not the statute. A ‘dispenser’ under the program is only a pharmacist or a qualifying veterinarian — a physician who hands medication to a patient is not one. Prescribers must check the program when first prescribing a benzodiazepine or an opioid medication and every 90 days for as long as that prescription is renewed; a dispenser checks only on four statutory triggers — the patient is not a Maine resident, the prescriber’s address is outside Maine, the patient pays cash with prescription insurance on file, or the patient has had no benzodiazepine or opioid prescription in the previous twelve months. There is no check-every-time duty for pharmacists. And the program’s ‘controlled substance’ borrows the federal schedules II through V, minus anabolic steroids — a different system from Maine’s own criminal schedules.
- Maine schedules drugs in its criminal code as Schedules W, X, Y and Z — there are no state Schedules I through V, and gabapentin is not scheduled by name anywhere in the list. The opioid limits that dominate Maine practice sit in the prescriber licensing chapters, not the Pharmacy Act: a prescriber may not exceed an aggregate of 100 morphine milligram equivalents per day, may prescribe no more than a 30-day supply for chronic pain within a 30-day period, and no more than a 7-day supply for acute pain within a 7-day period — fourteen days where the product is dispensed only in a stock bottle — and the Department of Health and Human Services, not the licensing boards, enforces those limits. Pharmacists have no opioid-limit section of their own. Substitution runs the other way from most states: it is mandatory, not permissive. Unless the prescriber bars it by hand — a handwritten check mark in the prescription’s box, or ‘dispense as written’ handwritten beside the signature — the pharmacist shall substitute a generic and therapeutically equivalent product, provided it is distributed by a business doing business in the United States and its price does not exceed the price of the product prescribed; a patient paying out of pocket is asked which product they prefer instead. After dispensing an interchangeable biological product, notice of the specific product dispensed is entered into an electronic record accessible to the prescriber within five business days.
- The people rules are Maine’s own. The Board of Pharmacy has seven members — five licensed pharmacists and two public members — appointed by the Governor to three-year terms with no term limit. Licensure begins at twenty-one, on a first professional degree and a board-approved internship, and there is no good-character qualification in the current statute — it was repealed in 2021, even though Board forms still collect a character certificate. The statute names no examination and states no passing score: the Board approves the examinations — at the Board layer, the NAPLEX and the Maine MPJE — and retains sole discretion over who has passed. Pharmacy interns are licensed; for foreign-educated interns the codified internship is 1,500 hours, at least 500 of them in the United States. Pharmacy technicians are licensed too — there is no advanced tier and no national-certification requirement — and Maine sets no numeric pharmacist-to-technician ratio; the pharmacy must keep the number of technicians on duty satisfactorily supervised at all times. Continuing education is fifteen hours every year, covering the calendar year preceding renewal — correspondence courses count, and there is no live-hour or law-hour mandate; the two hours on drug administration bind only pharmacists authorized to administer drugs and immunizations, and a pharmacist in a collaborative practice agreement takes five of the fifteen hours in the agreement’s practice areas. One codified fee — $75 — covers a pharmacist’s initial license and each renewal; the Board does not set fees at all, the Director of OPOR does, by rule. And licensure by endorsement runs through a single cross-reference to the OPOR framework: the applicant must hold licensure in another United States jurisdiction whose requirements are substantially equivalent to Maine’s, in good standing in every jurisdiction where they have ever held a license.
How the program maps to the exam
The PassProfessor Maine MPJE program carries 1,500 questions across the four competency areas at their published weights. Practice exams draw 100 scored questions in 150 minutes and are scored against a 70% practice benchmark — a target for your preparation, not the MPJE passing standard, because the real result is pass/fail and NABP publishes no raw passing score. Per-topic drills let you work one competency area at a time, and the free sample exam shows the question style before you enroll.
What changes on March 1, 2027
- From March 1, 2027, NABP replaces the MPJE Competency Statements with a new Content Outline — Pharmacy and Pharmacist Practice 30%, Medication Use Process 30%, Regulatory Authority and Legal Obligations 20%, Pharmacy Operations 20%.
- Every question in this bank is dual-tagged to both blueprints, so this program’s practice exams re-weight to the new outline when the change takes effect — the questions you are practicing now stay the right questions.
MPJE scores are not transferable: if you plan to license in more than one MPJE state, plan on that state’s law exam as well. And because every question here is dual-tagged, this program re-weights to the March 2027 outline when it takes effect without the bank changing.