Medicines are employed in undergraduate courses as motivational strategy, and the development of new experiments performable in simple laboratory infrastructure deserve attention. The experiment herein developed compares the extraction of paracetamol from reference and generic drugs. Paracetamol was chosen due to its general use by the population and ease access. Tablets were used from two commercial sources of reference (750 mg) and generic drugs (750 and 500 mg) purchased from local drugstores. For the average weight analysis 20 tablets were individually weighed by each group. Two tablets were pulverized and extracted in triplicate with ethyl acetate. After filtration and solvent evaporation, the active ingredient was obtained and identified by melting point and FTIR analyzes. The experiment was carried out by different groups of students and at different times, There was similar performance between the extractions of each group, which corroborates the analysis of pharmaceutical equivalence. Comparing different groups of students at different times, there was change in the mass of paracetamol extracted, which may be associated with changes in the excipient content of drugs over time. The procedure was efficient since there was similarity between the results obtained for generic and reference drugs. Therefore, it is consistent for use in the undergraduate classroom because allows discussion on pharmaceutical equivalence and interchangeability, involves simple laboratory infrastructure, execution and materials are easily obtained.