The RACP's confirmed results for the February 2026 Paediatrics and Child Health Divisional Written Examination show 245 candidates sitting overall, with 186 passing, a pass rate of 75.9%. Among Australian candidates specifically, 220 sat and 165 passed, a pass rate of 75.0%. As with the corresponding Adult Medicine figures, these numbers are genuinely informative when read correctly, and genuinely misleading when converted directly into a personal probability of passing.
Comparing cautiously against previous sittings
It is worth comparing this sitting's figures against previous cycles with real caution rather than confident conclusions. The Paediatrics and Child Health cohort is meaningfully smaller than the Adult Medicine cohort in absolute terms, 245 candidates compared with 925, which means each individual sitting's pass rate is more susceptible to being shifted by the specific characteristics of that particular, smaller cohort than a larger cohort's figures would be. A modest shift in pass rate between sittings for a smaller cohort like this one is less automatically meaningful than an equivalent shift would be for a larger one.
Why a changing pass rate does not establish cohort or paper quality
It is worth being explicit that a change in pass rate from one sitting to the next does not, on its own, demonstrate that one cohort was inherently stronger or weaker than another, or that one paper was inherently easier or harder. Criterion-referenced standard setting is specifically designed to adjust the pass mark to the actual difficulty of each paper, which means the pass rate reflects a combination of cohort preparation and standard-setting outcomes together, not a clean, isolated measure of either one alone.
Distinguishing pass rate from pass standard once again
The same distinction that applies to the Adult Medicine results applies equally here: the pass rate describes what proportion of this specific cohort cleared the threshold set for this specific sitting. It does not describe what that threshold actually was in numerical terms, and it says nothing directly about the standard an individual candidate preparing for a future sitting needs to meet.
Why converting this figure into an individual prediction is a mistake
A 75.9% cohort pass rate is not equivalent to a 75.9% chance of passing for any specific candidate preparing for a future sitting. This is worth repeating precisely because the temptation to make this conversion is genuinely strong when a headline percentage is presented prominently in a results announcement, and resisting that temptation is part of reading this kind of data responsibly.
Building a safety margin regardless of how the figure moves
The practical implication for preparation remains the same regardless of which direction the pass rate happens to move between sittings: build a genuine, consistent margin above the most recently published cut score in fresh, mixed mock performance, rather than treating either the historical pass-mark range or the cohort pass rate as a number to aim precisely for.
Designing this article for regular updating
Given that the RACP releases new Paediatrics and Child Health DWE results following each sitting, this kind of reference article is most useful when actively maintained and updated with each new release, rather than treated as a single, static account that becomes progressively outdated as further results are published.
Why the smaller cohort size deserves a slightly different reading approach
Because the Paediatrics and Child Health cohort is considerably smaller than the Adult Medicine cohort, a reader comparing this pass rate against the Adult Medicine figures published in the same results cycle should resist drawing conclusions about the relative difficulty of the two examinations from the pass rate alone. A smaller cohort's pass rate can shift more noticeably between sittings purely as a function of ordinary statistical variation, without that shift reflecting any genuine difference in exam difficulty or cohort quality. Reading the Paediatrics figures over several consecutive sittings, rather than any single one in isolation, gives a more stable and more informative picture than comparing one sitting's Paediatrics figure directly against one sitting's Adult Medicine figure.
What this means for a Paediatrics candidate's practical preparation
None of the statistical caution above changes the practical advice for an individual candidate: build a genuine, tested margin above the most recently published cut score in fresh, mixed practice, tracked separately across Medical Sciences and Clinical Applications as recommended elsewhere in this cluster, and treat the cohort pass rate as useful context rather than a predictor of personal outcome. This advice holds regardless of whether the published pass rate for a given sitting happens to be higher or lower than the previous one.