Spanning nearly 60 years, the American Board of Dental Examiners’ rich history is a reflection of the efforts of state boards from across the US and beyond to ensure that qualified dentists and dental hygienists provide safe care to the citizens they serve by demonstrating entry-level competency.
Initial attempts to create standards for the licensure of dentistry date to the late 1800s and early 1920s. In the early days, states with resources chose to develop their own licensure examinations.
After five years of talks, and early exams in New York and Washington, DC, eight states banded together in 1969 to found the North East Regional Board of Dental Examiners (NERB). Formed in Washington, D.C, additional jurisdictions included Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. At the time, only Dental examinations were available.
The Western Regional Examining Board’s first three states came together between 1976 and 1978. Utah, Oregon and Arizona worked together and delivered their first Dental Examination in 1978, and Dental Hygiene Examination in 1979.
Throughout the first 15 years, each testing agency continued to hone the examinations it delivered, working closely with regulators and programs to ensure that examinations reflected entry-level standards of care and could be performed routinely in a calibrated manner. Written tests used punch grids for responses & scoring.
The American Dental Licensure Examination Committee (ADLEC), a group of all testing agencies and multiple states met in 2003, laying the foundations for the American Board of Dental Examiners (ADEX). Starting in 2005, ADEX’s goal was to be a truly independent third party test developer for a national examination. ADEX did not deliver examinations.
The first ADEX dental examinations were delivered in 2006, while Dental Hygiene examinations were first conducted in 2007. The NERB organization delivered the first examinations in 2007 and 2008, respectively.
Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had retained state-based examinations until 2005, when the Council of Interstate Testing Agencies, Inc. was formed. Based in North Carolina, it delivered the CITA examination, then adopted the ADEX examination several years later.
With NERB’s growth now encompassing more than half of the US states, the organization changed its name to the Commission on Dental Competency Assessments (CDCA) on January 9th, 2015.
Later that same year, ADEX approved the first Patient-Centered Curriculum Integrated Format examinations (PC-CIF). These dental exams brought examiners into clinics on treatment days for grading of provided care as part of the scheduled treatment of patients of record.
Nearly twenty years after computer examinations changed the written exams, in the mid 2010s, examiners would use tablets with specialized software to grade hand skills examinations, allowing for efficient feedback and results reporting to candidates, schools, and state boards of dentistry. Eventually, information is stored in the cloud, and the doors to virtual dashboards and real-time information are opened.