Physician Assistants
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40 free Physician Assistants trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Physician assistants diagnose illness, order tests, prescribe treatment and assist in surgery, yet the profession is younger than many of the people it treats. It grew out of a doctor shortage in the 1960s, when a handful of former military medics were retrained to work alongside physicians, and it has since spread to every state and to countries on several continents. This quiz follows that story from the first class onward: the pioneers who broke barriers, the exams and credentials every PA has to earn, the laws that opened state after state, and the debate over what the profession should be called. Along the way you will meet PAs in politics, on television and in orbit. It is written for PAs, PA students and anyone planning a PA Week trivia night, but you do not need a white coat to play. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess teaches you something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hayley Arceneaux became the first PA in space as medical officer on which privately funded SpaceX mission?
Inspiration4
Inspiration4 also made Hayley Arceneaux, a bone cancer survivor who treats young patients at St. Jude, the first person to launch with a prosthesis.
Q 02Which former emergency medicine PA became the first member of her profession to serve in the US Congress?
Karen Bass
Karen Bass graduated from the PA program at USC's Keck School of Medicine in 1982, entered the House in 2011 and won the mayor's race in 2022.
Q 03The PA profession's original name carried which punctuation mark, officially dropped by the AAPA in 1981?
The apostrophe
The apostrophe made the original title 'physician's assistant', the form the first program used in 1965, until the AAPA renamed the profession 'physician assistant'.
Q 04Which long-running newspaper comic strip introduced readers to PAs when its character Chipper Wallet became one?
Gasoline Alley
Gasoline Alley cartoonist Dick Moores made Chipper Wallet a PA in 1971, when the real profession was only four years past its first graduating class.
Q 05The four former military medics chosen for the first PA class in 1965 had all served in which branch?
The Navy
The Navy had trained all four as hospital corpsmen, giving them considerable medical experience before they ever sat in a PA classroom.
Q 06The first PA curriculum was modelled on the fast-track training of doctors during which conflict?
World War II
World War II pushed Emory University to a three-year fast-track medical degree, and the doctor who designed it reused the idea for PAs two decades later.
Q 07Which future US president, as a state governor, signed the first law authorizing PAs to practice?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan signed California's Assembly Bill 2109 in September 1970, making the state the first to create PAs as a new category of health professional.
Q 08Which actress played Jeanie Boulet, the PA at Chicago's County General Hospital on the television drama ER?
Gloria Reuben
Gloria Reuben played the role from 1995 to 1999, and the PA's HIV diagnosis became one of the character's most notable storylines.
Q 09In 2021 the AAPA voted to replace 'assistant' with which word in the profession's official title?
Associate
Associate was affirmed by the AAPA House of Delegates in May 2021; backers argued it better reflects a clinician who diagnoses, treats and prescribes.
Q 10PAs were chosen in the 1970s to provide medical services to 10,000 workers building which giant project?
Trans-Alaska Pipeline
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline ran from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and PAs were picked to care for its workforce when the profession was barely a decade old.
Q 11Which North Carolina school graduated the first class of PAs in the United States in 1967?
Duke University
Duke University enrolled four ex-servicemen in 1965 and graduated three of them two years later, an anniversary PA Week celebrates every year.
Q 12Which chairman of medicine, regarded as the founder of the PA profession, assembled the first PA class?
Eugene Stead
Eugene Stead borrowed the idea from a rural North Carolina doctor, Amos Johnson, who had trained his own assistant to see patients while he was away.
Q 13National PA Week marks the anniversary of the first PA graduating class in which month of the year?
October
Q 21Which state in 2000 became the last of the 50 to authorize PA practice, after 25 years of lobbying?
Mississippi
Mississippi acted three decades after the first state PA law was signed, finally making it legal for PAs to practice in every state.
Q 22Which western state in 2024 became the first to adopt the profession's new title in state law?
Oregon
Oregon acted three years after the AAPA's national vote, so a PA's legal title came to depend on which state issued the license.
Q 23Which federal insurance program first recognized PAs as covered providers in every setting in 1997?
Medicare
Medicare had paid for PA services only in certain places, starting with rural clinics in 1977, until the Balanced Budget Act set one uniform rate.
October 6 was graduation day in 1967 and, by coincidence, the birthday of the program's founder, so PA Week runs from the 6th to the 12th.
Q 14In the credential PA-C, used by PAs who have passed their national board exam, what does the C mean?
Certified
Certified status dates from 1975, when the first PAs to pass the national exam received their certificates and began adding the C to their titles.
Q 15Which 300-question exam, sat in five one-hour blocks, must new PA graduates pass before they can be licensed?
PANCE
PANCE is the profession's entry board exam; working PAs later sit the PANRE to renew their credential, and the PACKRAT is a self-assessment test for students.
Q 16PA programs in the United States, typically about 27 months long, award which level of degree?
A master's
A master's became the standard as applicants arrived already holding bachelor's degrees, and a 2009 summit of PA leaders endorsed it as the profession's terminal degree.
Q 17Fittingly for a profession that began with ex-military medics, which federal body is the largest single employer of PAs?
Veterans Affairs
Veterans Affairs has counted more than 2,500 PAs across its health system, continuing a military link that is as old as the profession.
Q 18Loretta Ford and Henry Silver launched which sister profession in Colorado in 1965, the year PA training began?
Nurse practitioner
Nurse practitioner training began as a four-month course, and its graduates made up a tenth of the candidates at the first national PA exam in 1973.
Q 19Which country's 'barefoot doctors', often cited as forerunners of the PA, served its rural communes from the 1960s?
China
China folded its barefoot doctors into national policy in 1968 and kept them until the rural communes were broken up in the early 1980s.
Q 20In which USA Network series about a concierge doctor in the Hamptons is Divya Katdare the practice's PA?
Royal Pains
Royal Pains ran from 2009 to 2016 with Reshma Shetty as Divya Katdare, the character who proposes the concierge practice to Hank Lawson in the first place.
Q 24Which health law named PAs as one of three professions that act as primary providers in the United States?
Affordable Care Act
The Affordable Care Act listed PAs among the nation's primary care providers, and its coverage expansion doubled the projected need for them.
Q 25PAs who prescribe controlled substances must register with which federal agency?
DEA
The DEA groups PAs with other non-physician prescribers under the label 'mid-level', and each state decides which drug schedules they may prescribe.
Q 26Which Russian health worker, introduced to the army under Peter the Great, is counted among the forerunners of the PA?
Feldsher
Feldsher comes from a German word for a field barber-surgeon, and feldshers went on providing primary and maternity care in rural Russia for centuries.
Q 27On early American warships, the sailor who assisted the surgeon on board held which title, named after a porridge?
Loblolly boy
Loblolly boy came from the thick porridge served to sick sailors; the nickname became official in the regulations of 1814, and the job evolved into today's hospital corpsman.
Q 28Which 1970 graduate of the original PA program became the first woman to qualify as a PA?
Joyce Nichols
Joyce Nichols was also the first Black woman in the profession, and a senior housing community in Durham, The Joyce, was later named for her.
Q 29Most applicants to US PA schools apply through which centralized online service, launched in 2001?
CASPA
CASPA lets a candidate send a single application to any number of participating PA programs, much as AMCAS does for medical schools.
Q 30After the classroom phase, PA students must complete more than 2,000 hours of which kind of training?
Clinical rotations
Clinical rotations take students through family medicine, internal medicine, general surgery, emergency medicine and psychiatry, a plan modeled on medical school.