Western Regional Examination Board Tips

In dental school you will have to take several board and state and regional examinations.  All of them are required to pass in order to continue on to become a general dentist.  There are the National Board Dental Examinations I and II, a regional board and a state licensure examination. (Someone please clarify or correct me if I am wrong or misinformed) – I know you have to take a regional examination and some of the regional examinations are good for more than one state, and then some states are exclusive and only accept one test.  I am sure this information will be good for another article in the future.  I frequent SDN a lot, which is an online forum for students striving to become doctors.  There was thread that piqued my interest and reading through it I found a post that had tips on passing the WREB or the Western Regional Examination Board.
The whole thread (a thread is lingo for a discussion about a certain topic) about the WREB can be found here.  I have asked permission of Gurpreet S. Khurana, DMD – known on Student Doctor Network as DesiDentist, if I could qoute some tips that he gave in the discussion.  He graciously accepted and I thank him.  As with all stressful things and this test being no different I can always see one unifying theme: ORGANIZATION

• Do NOT lose points on rejections. If you are unsure about your perio patient submit 2 quads instead of one so they approve it.
• If you are unsure about your lesions keep looking and asking until you are sure. Change the x-ray time and angles to find the best x-ray to submit.
• Do not be late on any submission
• Use a caries detector, I highly recommend Snoop, it is dark blue and stains beautifully.
• If you think it is caries, demineralization, etc ask for a mod. I was doing an amalgam preparation and was unsure if I had caries so I asked for four mods (extend facial wall, extend axial wall, extend gingival floor, they approved two and rejected two. However if I had only asked for two but had caries on the third one then they could fail you. This is the only area you should risk losing points on if you have to, but make sure you ask and for the areas you don’t ask for a mod be 100% sure there is no caries there.
• Read the manual, make a note sheet.
• Take models of your patient and have them with you.
• Have an awesome assistant, especially one who can calm you down. I paid $300 for mine and she was worth every penny. My amalgam fractured (the school I took my exam at had these weird amalgamators and I could not figure out the time to triturate (mix) the amalgam I use). It was 4:05pm I had to submit a patient at 4:30. I used up 4 spills of amalgam out of 5 that I had (2 of them I had to test on these retero amalgamators, 1 didn’t mix well, I used one, and I had only one left.) Instead of burnishing the amalgam I decided to take it out, tighten the matrix band, wedge it and go at it. I used the disposable matrix bands from ultradent.
• Remember what can go wrong, will go wrong and be prepared for the worst.
• For endo, I would recommend choosing two teeth that are in close proximity together. Taking the rubber dam on and off is horrible and you lose lots of time. If you have #9 and #12 you can rubber dam them together, access them together take xrays and fill together. I had #10 and #19 and it was a pain going back and forth. Try to find straight root canals. Pre-measure the length before you set the teeth. Practice on a few “bad teeth” those w/ craze lines, calcified canals. If you are lucky to extract your own teeth on patients try to see if they have twins (lets say you are doing a full mouth extraction on someone and they are getting #12 and #5; #19 and #30 you can save one and practice on one, most teeth from the same patient usually have the same anatomy. Its like getting a sneak peek before the exam.
• Try to find both class II’s on the same patient.
• Take many x-rays of the teeth at different times and angles. Make sure you have a good idea of how much room you have from the pulp. 85% you can figure out if there is danger of hitting the pulp. If your amalgam will be between 1.5-2.5 mm deep, measure that on the x-ray and look for the “worst case scenario”.
• Work on your patient before you use them on the WREB. If they have other cavities you can test out what their dentin looks like and how well they handle anesthesia and a rubber dam.
• USE LOUPES, the examiners use them so why shouldn’t you? All the examiners at my site had 4.0x loupes. You want to see exactly what they see.
• Try to find teeth that are a little rotated, and note this before submitting: “Tooth is rotated, please note preparation will not be ideal.” Just that note will give you lots of room to prep and not worry. If there is light contact, note that, “contact present, but light.”
• Do not give up, there will be surprises, stuff you never thought about in your wildest dreams and stuff you can’t control, so don’t let anything freak you out.
• This exam is your “hazing” before you get into this fraternity which we call dentistry. Looking back you will realize that it was all worth it.

These all sound like good things to keep in mind while getting ready for the WREB or any regional exam for this matter.  Do you have a tip of your own?  Please comment below and share your thoughts and ideas!