Hello world!
I can’t believe that it’s been 4 years since I last posted, and almost 6 years since I graduated from physical therapy school. I’ll be sharing more life updates in other posts, but today we’re talking about the PCS Exam!
PCS stands for Pediatric Clinical Specialist. You can read more about the PCS and the PCS exam on the APTA website. There are many APTA specialties, however the most common for therapists working in pediatrics are the Pediatrics and the Neurology specialties.
I recently decided to study for the 2025 PCS exam, and created this spreadsheet to help gather studying materials. This spreadsheet is primarily organized by chapters in the Campbell textbook, and includes information from Campbell’s Physical Therapy for Children (6th edition), APTA Clinical summaries, APTA Pediatrics fact sheets, the Case Files in Physical Therapy Pediatrics book, Medbridge courses (from the list of courses from the PCS prep, not including the “optional” courses), PCS Advantage study guides, and Pushing Pediatrics podcast episodes.
I use this spreadsheet on Google Sheets so that I can also link to files that are in Google Drive folders.
To download the spreadsheet, click here for the Dropbox link.
PLEASE NOTE: This spreadsheet is not guaranteed to be comprehensive of everything you need to learn. Plenty of people don’t use some of the resources included and do just fine on the exam. My goal was to list the most common resources available, and you can feel free to add or subtract based on the things you plan to use to study. If this spreadsheet is overwhelming to you, then you don’t need to use it!
I will be adding to this spreadsheet as I find new things while I’m studying. If there is anything helpful that I should know about, please let me know!