The Adelaide Dental course

Teaching is built around Integrated Learning Activities. An ILA takes a realistic dental situation, such as a new patient presenting with a problem, and asks your group to work out what you need to know and do. You research it individually and together, then discuss your findings in class. The school describes this as case-based learning, with cases coordinated within and between years.

Around the ILAs sit class meetings, in person or online through the myLearning platform, plus workshops and learning laboratories that change by year. First year has Biodent Sciences workshops; third year adds a periodontal debridement and splinting workshop. Staff from other disciplines, such as physiology and pharmacology, teach into the course alongside dentists.

The balance shifts as you go. Years 1 and 2 are the most classroom heavy, spread across class meetings, laboratories, simulation clinic and clinic. By year 4 the week is mostly clinic sessions, and by year 5 formal teaching shrinks to a preclinical week, two common weeks and online modules while you are on placement.

Self-assessment runs through everything. Clinic and simulation tutors give verbal and written feedback in every session against published Clinical Assessment Criteria and Standards. You keep a self-assessment booklet, and each semester you write a learning plan setting your own goals. The final practical grade is an overall judgement of your year rather than a sum of session marks, and it takes attendance and professional behaviour into account.

First year is budgeted at 48 hours a week: up to 24 contact hours in semester 1 and 25 in semester 2, plus about 24 hours of group and individual study. In the 2026 timetable, Monday 9:10am to 2pm is class-meeting time delivered online through myLearning, with a shorter online session on Thursday. Tuesday morning is a timetabled clinical class in the Barr Smith South building and Tuesday afternoon a workshop in the AHMS building. Wednesday and Thursday carry further workshops, and Friday is the placement day, with a morning and an afternoon session in both semesters.

Second and third year rise to up to 28 contact hours and about 20 hours of preparation. A week mixes ILAs, class meetings, learning laboratories, simulation clinic, clinic sessions, tutorials with Volunteer Patients and radiography simulation. Third year opened in 2026 with an intensive block from 19 January, before the normal semester.

Fourth year is the heaviest. The outline lists 28 contact hours: five one-hour class meetings, seven three-hour clinic sessions per fortnight and a two to three hour ILA. It puts self-directed learning at 44 hours a week on top. In the 2026 second-semester timetable Monday is the class day, with blocks from 8:10am to 1pm and 1:10pm to 6pm in the AHMS building; Tuesday to Friday are clinic days from 9:10am to 5pm.

Fifth year is measured in clinic hours: 9 to 15 hours a week at your Adelaide home base plus sub-rostered sessions, and 24 to 30 hours a week on the rural or interstate block. The outline adds roughly 23 hours of self-directed study. Formal teaching is concentrated in a preclinical week, 5 to 9 January in 2026, and two common weeks in late April and mid August, when the year group returns to campus.

The program's inherent requirements, which every applicant must acknowledge, sum this up as 28 to 38 hours of scheduled activity a week plus about 20 hours of study, clinic preparation and reflection.

Anatomy is not a stand-alone subject; it is taught inside Dental Science and Practice as part of understanding a healthy patient. First year covers selected body systems, such as respiration, nutrient supply and waste removal, and movement, alongside the normal appearance of oral soft and hard tissues and the masticatory (chewing) system.

Second year turns to the head and neck, alongside microbiology, immunology and pathology, with anatomy practicals and learning laboratories in semester 2. From there anatomy is applied rather than taught separately: by fourth year you are expected to integrate it with physiology, pathology, pharmacology and oral medicine when planning care.

You also learn anatomy as it appears on X-rays. From first year you learn to pick out normal structures, fillings, decay and calculus on bitewing, periapical and panoramic images. You take radiographs on patients from second year, keep a radiology lab book in third, and rotate through the hospital's dental radiography department in fifth year.

You are in clinic from first year. The program rules describe first year as an introduction to dentistry in simulated and real clinic settings, and the two first-year courses carry 60 and 66 hours of work-integrated learning. In the 2026 timetable that time falls in a Tuesday-morning clinical class and a full Friday placement day. The early clinical work is taking a medical, dental and social history, examining the face, mouth, gums and teeth of healthy adults, recording findings, obtaining consent and giving preventive treatments.

Before anything invasive you rehearse it. In year 2 you cut and place fillings on manikins in the simulation clinic and practise giving local anaesthetic on classmates. You also carry out simple periodontal debridement, meaning cleaning below the gum line, on classmates and then on healthy adult patients, after completing SA Dental Service online modules and a clinic induction. Clinical hours roughly double to about 150 per semester.

Third year is the step up. It opens with a Preparation for Comprehensive Patient Care (PCPC) block in which you must reach pre-set levels of competence before you take on comprehensive care of your own patients. From then on you provide fillings, local anaesthetic, gum treatment, mouthguards and nightguards for adults, including people with medical and social problems, and you log every procedure. If your performance is judged a risk to patient safety, a meeting and an improvement plan follow.

Fourth year brings children and the harder procedures: crowns and bridges, root canal treatment, dentures and minor oral surgery, each preceded by simulation exercises and competency checks. In the specialist clinics the ADC's 2023 report noted supervision by registered specialists, postgraduate specialty students or experienced clinicians. In fifth year you plan and deliver whole treatment plans rather than single procedures.

Your patients are members of the public referred through SA Dental, the state's public dental service. The service tells patients when a student will treat them, and adults who decline student care can have their offer of treatment withdrawn and go back on the waiting list.

Assessment is organised by year, not by subject. Each year you enrol in two half-year Dental Science and Practice courses and in a zero-unit Annual B.D.S. Examination course that draws on the current and previous years, so nothing is left behind. In years 1 to 3 the outlines set the pass standard at 55 percent overall in the year's course plus a satisfactory result in every hurdle. Years 4 and 5 are passed on the clinical grades and hurdles described below.

The hurdles are the same shape every year. Practical performance comes first, with clinic and simulation clinic graded separately and both required to reach the standard. Then come written tests, written assignments, and compulsory tasks such as ILA submissions and radiography attendance, which are marked pass or fail. In the early years a student graded Not Met in the practical component is not offered another attempt that year, although second-year simulation may offer a Supplementary Practical Assessment.

The weighting moves towards the clinic as you progress: 80 percent written in first year, 70 in second and 60 in third, then 60 percent clinical performance in fourth year and 70 percent in fifth. Clinical grades are criterion based. In the early years they are Well Above, Above, Met, Not Yet Met or Not Met Expectations; in years 4 and 5 they are E, G, S, B or U, backed by caseload audits and discipline logbooks.

The annual examinations use three formats. The Progressive Integrated Assessment (PIA) is a cumulative written exam. Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (DOPS) means a tutor watches you carry out a procedure and scores it against set criteria. An Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) is a circuit of timed stations, each testing one task such as an examination, an explanation to a patient or an X-ray interpretation. First year uses PIA and DOPS, second year adds OSCEs, and third year uses all three; fourth year moves to integrated multidisciplinary examinations built on case scenarios.

There is no separate national licensing examination for graduates of Australian dental courses. Because the BDS is ADC accredited, you apply to the Dental Board of Australia, through the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), for general registration. AHPRA lets final-year students apply up to 90 days before finishing and aims to finalise the application within two weeks of receiving your results.

Placements are compulsory in every year, and the program rules require them away from the North Terrace campus in metropolitan Adelaide, rural South Australia and interstate. The anchor is the Adelaide Dental Hospital, run by the university in partnership with the South Australian Dental Service on Levels 11 and 12 of the AHMS building. It has 89 dental chairs, is open weekdays from 8:30am to 4:30pm, takes patients by referral from SA Dental clinics, and offers general dentistry and the main specialist services.

SA Dental says a significant amount of student training happens at the hospital and a smaller share in its community clinics. Those clinics enter your timetable in fourth year, when children's dentistry and general practice sessions are held at suburban SA Dental Service clinics by individual roster. In fifth year one SA Dental Service clinic, the hospital or a metropolitan clinic, becomes your home base.

The rural and interstate block is the biggest move. The program rules make 12 to 13 weeks of rural and/or interstate placement compulsory in final year, and the fifth-year outline lists SA Dental Service rural clinics, Canberra, Tasmania and Wyong in New South Wales. The ADC's 2023 report named Devonport and Hobart as the Tasmanian sites and recorded plans to restart rural placements with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. You are in clinic 24 to 30 hours a week and arrange your own travel.

Shorter sub-rosters round out final year: the Community Outreach Dental Program clinic at Light Square Common Ground, a one-week rotation in the Oral Surgery Unit and the dental radiography department. There is also the hospital's Special Needs Unit, which treats people with complex medical, physical and intellectual disabilities.

Before any placement you sign a deed poll with SA Health promising to protect patient information. You also need tuberculosis screening, a criminal history check from the Department of Human Services, immunisation evidence meeting the state's health-worker policy, and student registration with the dental regulator. Professional dress applies in clinic.

There are no elective courses: every student follows the same sequence of core Dental Science and Practice courses. The choices you get are inside the clinical program. The ADC's 2023 report describes the Community Outreach Dental Program as a placement option students may choose, and the final-year block can be rural or interstate.

Before the 2026 merger the dental school's pages advertised a study-overseas option for dentistry and oral health students, with a faculty email contact, alongside research travel scholarships. Those pages now redirect to the merged school's site, so check with the College of Health whether the option continues.

No Honours, intercalated or elective year is built into the BDS study plan. Intercalating means pausing a professional course to take an extra degree before returning to it. Adelaide's plan runs straight through five years of core courses. Because the curriculum is so integrated, the school gives no credit for prior study and no entry into later years, so everyone starts in year 1.

Before the merger, the University of Adelaide offered a one-year Bachelor of Science in Dentistry (Honours) to students who had passed third year of the BDS. It was a research degree built around a project and thesis. Adelaide University's 2026 list of medicine, dentistry and oral health degrees does not include it, so ask the school whether a research year is still possible.

Research still touches the course through the Oral Health Promotion assignment in third year and the Population Oral Health assignment in fifth. The School of Dentistry hosts the Australian Research Centre for Population Oral Health (ARCPOH), which ran the National Child Oral Health Study and the National Study of Adult Oral Health. ARCPOH says it offers learning opportunities to Adelaide University students. Specialist training comes after the BDS, through postgraduate study leading to registration as a dental specialist.

The Adelaide Health and Medical Sciences (AHMS) building stands on the corner of North Terrace and George Street, in the BioMed City precinct beside the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI). It cost $246 million and brings together more than 1,700 students and 600 health researchers.

The Adelaide Dental Simulation Clinic opened in early 2013. It has 90 individual simulators, each with a manikin, dental equipment, PC and monitor, so a whole year group can work at once, plus haptic simulators, virtual-reality simulators and CAD-CAM scanning. It also holds two dental surgeries, a Clinical Dental Education Unit, a plaster laboratory, and radiology and sterilisation areas.

The hospital floors above are a working public clinic. Besides the general and specialist clinics described under placements, they hold a Special Needs Unit and a Residential Aged Care Emergency dental service for house-bound patients.

Timetabled rooms in 2026 spread across the City Campus West. Class meetings run through the myLearning platform and in AHMS teaching rooms, and other sessions use the Barr Smith South, Helen Mayo South, Nexus10 and Sir Hans Heysen buildings.

Academic support is built into the clinic. The session-by-session tutor feedback and learning plans described under teaching feed into formal checkpoints. At the end of semester 1 you are told what standard you have reached, and anyone below it meets the clinic or year coordinators. In years 2 and 3 the coordinators also collect progress information from all your tutors mid-way through semester 2, and anyone who has slipped is asked to meet them again.

Each year has a course coordinator and year-level coordinators, with a Program Director over the whole BDS. If you cannot attend a clinic you phone the clinic, email the coordinator and lodge a non-attendance form. Before the merger the dental school's pages also pointed students to a faculty peer-mentoring program and to the Adelaide University Dental Students Society; ask the College of Health what continues under the new structure.

Read the inherent requirements before you apply. They cover ethical behaviour, behavioural stability, legal obligations, communication, cognition, sensory abilities, strength and mobility, and sustained performance. The school makes reasonable adjustments for disability or chronic health conditions, but says some take four to eight weeks to organise and some a year, because clinic rosters and placements are set the year before. Anyone with impaired hand or arm function or significant hearing or vision impairment is advised to talk to the university first.

The ADC reaccredited the course from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2030 with six conditions. Its August 2023 visit had heard concerns about how complaints, including about bullying, were handled inside the school. It also heard concerns about staff conduct towards students and about cultural safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and other students. The school had to overhaul its complaints process, train staff and students on it, and show its work at a targeted follow-up visit in 2024.

That visit took place on 20 August 2024. The ADC's team found the school had built a new complaints process with the university's Integrity Unit, including a way to raise concerns anonymously. Staff had begun mandatory training that includes cultural safety, and tutors had been trained in giving feedback. On 11 October 2024 the ADC decided accreditation would continue without conditions. It asked only for two follow-up reports by August 2025, on the complaints system and on staff training in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. Its November 2025 update records that both were accepted.