Perceived Anxiety among Undergraduate Dental Students During Oral and Written Prosthetic Examination

Abstract

Background: The test of anxiety refers to emotional states with behavioral and psychological correlates. Objectives: To determine if anxiety induced by exams affects the oral and written prosthetic examination performance of dental students in Iraq. Materials and Methods: The study sample consisted of 5th year dental students (142 males and females). The participants were given the questionnaire in the first 2 min of the prosthodontic written exam and asked to complete it before opening the exam. For the oral exam, we asked the participating students to fill out the questionnaire while sitting in front of the exam professor committee at the beginning of the exam. Then, a 5-point Likert scale. All data were collected and analyzed using the mean with standard deviation as a simple descriptive statistic to describe the study variables of the association between categorical variables using Kandall’s tau test. Results: There was a significant difference between the anxiety scale and the degree of anxiety between the oral and written exams. The degree of males in the oral exam was higher than that of females. The anxiety from the written exam was 2.62 for males, whereas it was 3.51 for females, and the degree for males in the written exam was higher than for females. Conclusion: There were significant differences between the anxiety scale and the performance on the exam between males and females. There is a significant association between the degree of anxiety and the degree obtained from the oral and written prosthetic examinations. Females were more anxious than males from oral and written exams, and there is a significant difference between genders regarding anxiety levels and exam degrees.

Keywords

• anxiety
• oral prosthetic exam
• written prosthetic exam