I'm not going to sugarcoat it — I failed the NBDE Part I twice before finally passing last spring, and both times I thought I'd studied enough. The second fail really wrecked my confidence. I was averaging maybe 65% on practice questions and figured that was close enough. It wasn't. After that second attempt I completely overhauled my approach.
What actually changed things was stopping the passive reading and forcing myself to do timed Dental practice test sessions every single day. I found that working through Dental Test 2 helped me identify my weak spots in biochemistry and microbiology way faster than any study guide I'd been using. I also started tracking which question types I consistently missed — turns out I had a huge blind spot in pharmacology that I'd just been ignoring.
Anyone else here prep for dental boards after a failed attempt? I'm curious what timelines people gave themselves. I took about 14 weeks the third time around, studying 3-4 hours a day, and finally hit an 82. Happy to share more details if it helps.
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