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When you are in undergraduate class and the professor tells you you have a quiz tomorrow, you usually go home, watch three hours of TV, play with your kids, or hang out with friends, then go to sleep at 10pm. In the morning you wake up and 10 minutes before class you cram 15 facts into your brain and get quized on 10 of them. If you are good, you miss none.

I would change this habit before dental school or else you are in for a rude awakening! We had our first quiz of the semester in Restorative Dentistry II last Tuesday and although it wasn’t a beast, preparing for it was. Some reading this may disagree with the amount of reading I and fellow classmates may have done, but I do pay close to 300 dollars a day (every day 24/7 for four years) in tuition, etc. so I might as well make the most of it.

Here is the reading our quiz was centered on:

Reading from ‘The Art & Science of Operative Dentistry’ by Sturdevant (A 1000 page textbook on various dental procedure from posture to application of rubber dam to drilling and filling):

Chapters 2, 3, 6, and pp. 449-452, 419-430, 435-446, 690-702, 709-720, 778-782, 463-492, 737-749

Also reading from a packet: Sections 1-4, 10

5 Powerpoint lectures

2-4 articles (I didn’t get time to read these)

Various online resources (glanced through them)

This is two weeks worth of reading. Granted it is EASY for the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year dental students because of their exposure, but to a young grasshopper as myself and my classmates, it was pretty extensive. New terminology, depth of cuts (like memorizing that the gingival wall ideal outline form should be 1.5 mm in width from the proximal surface to the axial wall. (I just lost all the pre-dental students on that one - you guys get the idea) to the proper bur selection for the cavity prep. All good things to memorize, but very extensive.

After cramming in all the reading, memorizing my little review sheet, looking at back quizzes (one question remained the same) I still missed one. 4/5. 80%

I am not sharing this information to discourage anyone, nor am I discouraged. This is a good grade and it was (in a sadistic way) fun to read, after all, we did CHOOSE to do this and it is FUN, even if it includes reading 400 pages in two weeks.