Assessment of Clinical Judgement (ACJ)

1 min read

06 Sep

06Sep

Hello TTD friends,

After passing AFK with a score of 75 percentile or higher, you have two choices. Either you can go the University route or take on the equivalency process.

After the AFK result is declared, and you get a passing score on your test, you are eligible to register for ACJ and ACS exams. Some people take both exams together; some decide to take one exam at a time; it depends on your life situation. I chose to take one exam at a time because I was working two jobs at that time to pay for my exams, pay the bills and keeping my family fed.

Assessment of Clinical Judgement used to be a paper-based exam, but now it's Prometric. It is held at various Prometric test centres throughout Canada and some locations in New Zealand and Australia.

If you love diagnosing oral conditions, you will enjoy reading for this exam and will have fun taking this exam. The exam consists of multiple-choice questions; there are a few sample questions available on the NDEB website that you can look at to get started. You should be focusing on Oral Medicine and dental radiographs here; I bought the latest edition of Neville just for the exam. For dental X-rays, White and Pharoah is the gold standard. Your local library will be your best friend during this time. You can request them to bring in a particular author, and they do their very best to get the requested book from other libraries.

Look at as many oral pathology (OP) pictures and dental X-rays as you can. For OP, look at the picture, read about the pathognomic features for every condition and treatment. For radiographic interpretation, look at as many X-rays as you can find online and in books and look for caries, periodontal disease presence. You should be able to tell a normal anatomical structure from an abnormal one; there will be questions on normal anatomy in a radiograph and lots on caries diagnosis questions.

Unlike AFK, this exam has negative marking. There might be many correct answers for one question, and if you choose one incorrect option, you will score a zero for that particular question. So it is vital for this exam that you only select the answer that you are 100% sure about. That being said, you will not get -1 ever; the lowest score for any wrong answered question would be a Zero. No guessing game for this exam, please!

I highly recommend finding a study partner for this exam. I had an online study partner, and we dedicated two hours each day to our ACJ Discussions. Many online and in-person coaching centres help prepare for this exam. I didn't join any coaching institute, so I can't speak to that. If you are not familiar with the Prometric system, it would be wise to take a mock exam with any of the coaching institutions. Just google ACJ training institute, and many names will come up, choose one based on Google reviews.

This exam is vital, not just to get your license, but the knowledge you gain here will serve you for the rest of your career, so dive in with all you got and enjoy the learning process. It will save you from lots of wrong diagnoses and lawsuits in the future. It will also help you become a holistic dentist; you will be able to catch a lot of systemic conditions just by doing a thorough oral exam. Think of all the lives you can save!