Correlation of quantity of dental students' clinical experiences with faculty evaluation of overall clinical competence: a twenty-two-year retrospective investigation.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between the quantity of a student's clinical experiences in the final year of dental school and the student's overall clinical competence at graduation, as evaluated by faculty at the University of Iowa College of Dentistry. Further, the authors sought to determine whether this correlation changed over time, as new generations of students come to dental school. Information including year of graduation, age at graduation, final grade in the course Clinical Competencies in Comprehensive Care, and final total Clinical Experience Units (CEUs) earned by each student in the D4 Family Dentistry Clinic was collected for 1987-2008 graduates of the University of Iowa College of Dentistry. Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (r(s)) was computed for the association of final clinical course grade and final CEU total for each graduation year. The correlation between final course grade and final CEU total was variable, ranging from moderately strong (r(s)=0.614, Class of 1991) to negligible (r(s)=-0.013, Class of 2008). This correlation generally tended to become weaker over time. The results of this study suggest that the terminal quality of a dental student's work is not solely a function of repetitions of prescribed procedures and that repetition of procedures may have even less influence on the quality of clinical performance for the new generation of dental students.