I have been following the controversy generated by the October JADA editorial, "The Perfect Patient," and feel compelled to add my perspective as a dental examiner and dental educator.
When I was a dental student at Tufts, I questioned the need for licensing exams right along with the rest of my classmates. Thirty years have passed since I graduated from dental school, but licensing exams still generate as much discussion and contempt as they did in 1971.
As a member of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Dentistry, I have served as an examiner for the North East Regional Boards, or NERB, for seven years. In this time, I have taken part in 14 NERB exams at eight different dental schools in seven states. I am also a part-time clinical professor of operative and prosthetic dentistry at the University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine.
While most candidates who take the NERB exam are well qualified and usually pass the exam on the first attempt, there are always some candidates who are so unprepared and so incompetent that it defies logic that they possibly could have graduated from an ADA-accredited school. According to NERB statistics, approximately 10 percent of the NERB candidates never pass the examination. Whether these individuals ultimately pass another board exam or change careers is not known.
Last year, the American Dental Association [the 2000 House of Delegates] passed a resolution seeking to end the use of human subjects for Board Examinations by the year 2005. There are those who believe that using human subjects for board exams is unethical. It seems to me that what is truly unethical is allowing incompetent practitioners to graduate from dental school and not be required to show competence treating human subjects.
How many mannequins does the average dentist treat in his or her daily practice?
