The Journal of the American Dental Association
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Licensure examinations in dentistry have become an increasing concern, owing to ethical issues in the use of patients, difficulties in seeing relationships between outcomes of licensure examinations and performance in educational programs, and questions on the reliability of "one-shot" clinical examinations. Using data from a nine-year period, the authors compared the results of clinical licensing tests and the academic class ranks of the candidates. ⋯ If the results of this study can be generalized to all U.S. licensure examinations, basing licensing decisions on clinical licensure examination alone risks licensure decisions of low validity. Use of patients in examinations of questionable validity may be unethical because they may have been subjected to risk of irreversible damage without contribution to a valid decision-making process by the licensing authority.