The Griffith Dental course

Years 1 and 2 of the bachelor mix two kinds of course. Science courses, such as Cells, Tissues, and Regulation or Biochemistry, are mostly taught by the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, and several are shared with other health degrees. Dental courses, coded DOH, are run by the School of Medicine and Dentistry for dental students only.

Each dental course is built from components, each with its own teaching and marks. Pre-Clinical Dental Sciences 4, for example, combines cariology and preventive dentistry (tooth decay and how to stop it), communication skills, equity, diversity and sustainability, and dental hygiene.

The school says it makes extensive use of small-group and simulation-based learning. It also stresses interprofessional learning, where you learn with, from and about students in other health degrees, because dentists work in teams with other professionals.

The academic year is longer than a standard university year, and some evenings and Saturdays may be needed. From Year 1 Trimester 2, some dental courses start earlier and finish later than Griffith's standard trimester dates. The 2027 Dentistry calendar gives 25 weeks for Year 1, 29 for Year 2, 32 for Year 3, 33 for Year 4 and 34 for Year 5. In 2026, Year 1 began on 2 March and the master's clinical courses on 26 January.

Griffith's general guide is that each course takes 10 to 12 hours a week on average, counting classes, study and assessment, and dental students take four courses a trimester in Years 1 to 4. The 2026 class timetables give a feel for how that time is spent, though they will change for 2027.

In Year 1 Trimester 1, Pre-clinical Dental Sciences 1 had live-streamed lectures, a two-hour laboratory every Thursday in the Griffith Health Centre and four two-hour tutorials across the trimester. In Year 2 Trimester 1, Pre-Clinical Dental Sciences 3 alone had two four-hour laboratory sessions a week, on Mondays and Fridays, plus practicum sessions in a clinic early in the trimester.

The master's weeks are built around the clinic. The 2026 Year 4 timetable lists Professional Practice 2 clinic sessions in the undergraduate clinic every weekday morning and afternoon, alongside live-streamed lectures and half-day workshops and tutorials. In final year, Professional Practice 3 sessions run in a postgraduate clinic through the week, with tutorials and a weekly research project seminar.

Anatomy is taught in Year 1. Anatomy and Physiology Systems I covers the skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine and reproductive systems, including the 12 cranial nerves. Its practical laboratories include human cadaveric material, and you must show you can handle human tissue and identify structures on cadaveric or plastinated specimens, real tissue preserved with plastic. Anatomy and Physiology Systems II continues with the heart and blood vessels, lungs, kidneys, gut and immune system.

Head and neck anatomy for dentistry comes in Pre-clinical Dental Sciences 2, in Year 1 Trimester 2. In the 2026 profile you study the embryology of the head and neck, the tissues of the teeth and gums, and the bones and openings of the skull. You identify head and neck structures, including blood vessels, lymph nodes and nerves, on microscope slides, plastic models and real cadaver specimens. You also learn the muscles of chewing and facial expression and the jaw joint.

In 2026 that course was assessed by two laboratory exams, worth 25% each, and an end-of-trimester written exam worth 50%.

Years 1 and 2 are pre-clinical, as the dental course titles say, and skills build in stages. You start with hand skills in simulation in your first trimester, then place fillings on model teeth in Year 2. Year 2 also covers dental X-rays and radiation safety, instrument skills for cleaning teeth and gums, and safe work practices in preparation for patient care.

Before any placement you must meet Griffith Health's professional practice requirements, most of them by the end of your first trimester. They include vaccinations and health tests, a Blue Card (Queensland's working with children check), a national police check, first aid and CPR certificates, and online training. Some vaccination schedules take up to seven months, and the Hepatitis B course, with its follow-up blood test, can run until the end of your second trimester.

Dentistry involves exposure-prone procedures, where an injury to you could expose a patient's open tissues to your blood. So you also need a doctor-signed declaration that you have been tested for HIV and hepatitis C, with the tests repeated every three years. Griffith registers you as a student with the Dental Board of Australia through Ahpra, so you do not apply yourself, and you then have obligations to the Board as a registered student.

Patient care begins in Year 3 with Professional Practice 1, a year-long course that runs for the first time in 2027, so it has no published timetable or assessment yet. Its overview says you learn to collect and record patients' details, diagnose, manage and plan simple treatment, and assist more senior students. It also covers the principles behind local anaesthesia. The bachelor's 270 hours of clinical practice, over 30 weeks, take place in the Griffith University Dental Clinic, with general dentists and specialists supervising every session.

Patients come to the clinic from the public. Each new patient has an admission appointment, which may include X-rays, and an in-person screening, then is referred to the student best placed to meet their needs. Students work in teams and may refer patients to each other, and each patient signs a treatment plan before work starts. Under Griffith's agreement with Queensland Health, Queensland residents with concession or pension cards, and children aged 4 to 16, pay nothing for common services in the student clinic.

Responsibility grows in the master. Professional Practice 2 expects you to manage every patient and scenario in your allotted sessions, recognise when to refer to a specialist and log a set of minimum clinical requirements. In final year you provide comprehensive care, treat patients with more advanced needs and manage whole cases.

In Years 1 and 2 most marks come from written and practical exams, set course by course. Written exams in the 2026 profiles mix selected-response questions, where you choose from options, with constructed-response questions, where you write the answer. Practical exams test laboratory work and procedures on models.

You must pass every course in a year before moving on. In most of the bachelor's dental courses every assessment item is a mandatory pass, so a strong mark in one part cannot make up for failing another. The bachelor's dental courses are designated courses, as are the master's Professional Practice and Clinical Dental Sciences courses. Failing one can lead to exclusion, and in the master it brings a review by the Health Assessment Board.

Supplementary assessment, a second attempt at a failed task, was available in the bachelor's dental courses in 2026. It was not available in the second parts of Professional Practice 2, Professional Practice 3 and the Research Project. Electronic exams run on Examplify, so you need a laptop that meets its requirements.

In Year 4, Professional Practice 2 was assessed in 2026 by workplace-based clinical grading, where supervisors grade your clinical work, and a Virtual OSCE, each worth 50%, plus the clinical requirements logbook. An OSCE, or Objective Structured Clinical Examination, is usually a circuit of timed stations; Griffith lists its virtual version as a selected-response exam.

In final year, the 2026 Professional Practice 3 assessment table gives 50% to a case-based viva voce, an oral exam in which examiners question you on patient cases. Workplace-based clinical grading carries 30%, a clinical assessment from your placement 15% and a written exam on practice management and small business administration 5%. Oral surgery and oral radiology reports and the logbook carry no marks but must be submitted.

Graduates of programs accredited by the ADC and approved by the Dental Board of Australia can apply for registration up to three months before they finish, and must be registered before they start work. Unlike medicine, there is no internship, the supervised first year of work that medical graduates complete before full registration.

• Year 2 pathology (2026): three exams, a Foundational Mastery Exam (20%), a System Integration Exam (30%) and a final exam (50%).
• Year 3: in Clinical Dental Sciences 1 and 4, you can sit the theory exam only once your endodontics and prosthodontics laboratory logbooks are complete.
• In the 2026 Year 4 course profiles, practical sessions are compulsory. Being absent or late for more than one session a trimester, even with a good reason, may mean you do not meet the course requirements.

Your clinical base is the Griffith University Dental Clinic in the Griffith Health Centre at Southport, on the Gold Coast campus. All of the bachelor's clinical hours, and 900 hours of the master's clinical work, are spent there.

The master adds 336 hours on placement in private dental practices in metropolitan, regional and rural areas of Queensland and northern New South Wales. Griffith's dentistry study page also mentions its network of partner clinics in regional areas. Final year's Professional Practice 3 has an Outplacements component in both trimesters, which Griffith presents as a step towards independent practice and a link to future employers. Placement travel and accommodation are among the costs you meet yourself.

Placements are managed through Sonia, Griffith Health's online placement system, and your requirements must stay current throughout the course. A placement in a Queensland Health or NSW Health facility brings that service's own extra online training and forms. In the master you may need to show you meet Queensland Health's immunisation policy for health care workers.

Griffith's community outreach page also describes students' work in the community. It says Griffith partners with free State Government dental clinics in Warwick, Tweed Heads, Kingaroy, Stanthorpe, Woolloongabba and Southport, where students give a full range of treatment at no cost to patients. The page adds that Griffith's dental clinic runs services in Warwick, Stanthorpe and Kingaroy, and that dental students have visited Gold Coast preschools since 2013 to teach oral health.

The same outreach page describes a free Hope4Health dental clinic at Cherbourg, a largely Indigenous community west of Gympie, run entirely by students and volunteers in their final years of dentistry. Hope4Health is a charity founded by Griffith students in 2006. Griffith's rural priority page, which covers its medicine and dentistry degrees together, adds that students may have the option of rural placements in places including Toowoomba, Stanthorpe, Warwick, Dalby and Palm Island.

Honours is optional: the Bachelor of Dental Health Science (Honours), BDentHSc(Hons), is an 80-credit-point research degree. It takes an extra year full time or two years part time, and you can take it alongside the Master of Dentistry, part time at 10 credit points a semester. The master's page says students who delay entry to the master, which they may do for up to a year, cannot be guaranteed a place. Their entry then depends on available dental chairs and on passing a clinical and written exam.

The Honours degree has 30 credit points of coursework and a 50-credit-point dissertation. You start with Dissertation Preparation in your first trimester, take Qualitative or Quantitative Research, and choose either Applied Research Statistics and Meta-Analysis or an Independent Practice Project. The dissertation is a supervised research project written up as a thesis and presented at a seminar. Honours is awarded in four classes, from Class I to Class III, based on your program GPA and a minimum dissertation mark.

You need to find a supervisor before you apply. The school's dentistry research teams work on regenerative dentistry and biomaterials, periodontal medicine, gum and implant disease, and laser dentistry and pulp biology. A public oral health team works with local communities and Queensland Health on oral health promotion, rural and remote needs, and barriers to care.

The Griffith Health Centre, also called the Ian O'Connor building (G40), is a purpose-built AUS$150 million building on the Gold Coast campus. It holds the dental clinic and the laboratories, tutorial rooms and undergraduate and postgraduate clinics named in the 2026 dental course timetables. The Gold Coast University Hospital G:Link light rail stop is a short walk away.

The Griffith University Dental Clinic is on Level 3. The degree page gives 117 dental chairs and over 6,000 patient appointments a year, while the clinic's own page describes over 110 chairs treating over 1,000 patients a week. It has a 150-seat patient lounge and an on-site radiology area run by an outside provider.

Alongside the clinic are Griffith's own commercial prosthetic dental and clinical skills laboratory and a dedicated area for dental researchers.

Support starts inside the course. Pre-clinical Dental Sciences 1 includes a Transition Through University component to help you settle into study. A first-year science course, Cells, Tissues, and Regulation, embeds a wellbeing module called You Matter: Prioritise Your Wellbeing, with optional training on respectful workplaces and being an active bystander.

Each degree has a Program Director who advises on your study program, enrolment, progress and credit. The Health Placement Support Hub helps you complete and keep up your placement requirements, and each program has its own Placement Officer.

Griffith's inherent requirements for its dental programs set out the abilities you need across eight areas, from ethical behaviour and communication to sensory ability, strength and mobility, and sustainable performance. If a disability or health condition may make these hard to meet, talk to the Program Director or a Disability Advisor. They can work with you on reasonable adjustments, such as assistive technology, extra exam time or notetaking support.

You can also join the Australian Dental Association as a student member at no cost, which lets you attend its meetings and receive its publications.