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For more than 30 years, Chemeketa’s Dental Assisting students have aced Dental Assisting National Board exams required for them to work in a dental office.

“We were always seeing 100% scores, almost across the board,” said Program Chair, Kara Radu. She and her colleague, Jill Lomax, explained that students always took the three required exams in June, at the end of their nine-month program.

Then after the pandemic hit, for the first time in their experience as faculty for the program, they saw scores on the Infection Control Exam (ICE) take a serious dip. And the dip continued the next year. “It started happening post-COVID. And the scores were not bouncing back,” Jill said. 

Puzzled, the faculty turned to their peers. 

Educators across Oregon who teach students to become dental assistants have long had a consortium that met in person before COVID, and more typically over Zoom now. Several years ago, a few of the consortium members came together to educate Oregon legislators about the high standards expected of their graduates, and compared notes about when their students took required exams.

The consortium allowed programs to  borrow ideas from other accredited programs, such as integrating optional certifications into the program to make students all the more employable. "It's great to learn how other programs run and to bring progressive ideas that they do into our program.”

So in the face of the ICE test score dilemma, our faculty reached out to their consortium colleagues to learn the details about when they had their students take their required exams. 

They took what they learned from those conversations and reviewed their curriculum to decide where to possibly make a change. In the end, they decided to move the timing for their students to take the ICE exam to Spring Break, after completing their first two terms and soon after they completed coursework on infection control and its impacts.

The result was immediate. Scores climbed 5.4% in the first year after the change and then this spring, 30 out of their 31 students passed the exam, with the one score that did not pass missing the cut off by just one question. 

An added benefit of the change? Students get a first “go” at using the testing center. They were already passing the other two exams at high rates, but now it’s a better experience for them. “We have them all take it within the same day or two,” Kara explained. “It gives them a taste of what it looks like,” Jill said.