A letter writer (Frederic S. Mackler) in June JADA ("Licensing Exams") stated, "According to [North East Regional Board, or NERB] statistics, approximately 10 percent of the NERB candidates never pass the examination."
On the other hand, Dr. Ellis H. Hall, NERB’s director of examinations, wrote in a Feb. 2, 2001, memo to me, "Enclosed is the following information: A chart demonstrating the pass rates of candidates from NERB dental schools who began the examination in Spring 2000 and have availed themselves of all opportunities to pass the NERB examination." The chart, in turn, stated in its heading: "Overall–97.6 percent of these examinees passed the examination."
Either the letter writer is not correct or we should conclude that most of the graduates of accredited schools who do not pass the NERB on the first attempt elect not to take it again. With respect to the letter writer’s conjectures about what happens to such candidates, our information indicates that they do pass a different examination, but not necessarily "ultimately" as the writer pejoratively wrote.
New graduates who are able to locate on either side of a state border have learned to take another examination within the same examination period because they know that NERB’s failure rate on initial examination is three to four times as high as for the other regional examining agencies.
Dr. Hall’s data showed that those who do take the NERB examination again overwhelmingly pass, without intervening remediation. Something is wrong with this picture.
In response to the letter writer’s query about how many mannequins does the average dentist treat, I would counter, "How many and what kind of surgeries does the average general surgeon have to do to get a license?" The answer is, of course, none.
Physicians get licensed after passing national boards and completing an accredited in-ternship, not by cutting a patient for inspection in a licensing examination. In today’s world, I can’t see an ethical construct in using invasive and irreversible procedures in human beings for the overt purpose of detecting clinical incompetence.
We simply must fix the currently inconsistent and ethically questionable licensing system for dentistry in this country, now and definitively. In all conscience, we can do no less for our colleagues and the public who grant our professional status.
