I've been a dental assistant for 6 years in Ohio and I'm finally going for my EFDA certification. My office is paying for the prep course, which is great, but the course alone feels like it's not enough — we get about 40 hours of instruction and then we're expected to pass both a written and clinical exam. The written is 150 questions with a passing score around 75%.
I'm most worried about the matrix band placement and Class II composite sections. I've been assisting on these for years but doing them myself under exam conditions is different. My course instructor said about 30% of students who fail the clinical do so on posterior composites specifically — tooth isolation, matrix band positioning, and incremental layering are all being evaluated simultaneously.
I started using an EFDA practice test to drill the written content and it's been useful for the infection control and OSHA sections, but the clinical judgment questions are tricky. I'm studying about 90 minutes a day, 4 days a week, for the next 6 weeks. Anyone who's passed recently — was the real exam harder than your practice materials?
The clinical exam was harder for me than the written. I practiced placing matrix bands on a manikin every day for 3 weeks leading up to it and I still felt the time pressure. Get as many hands-on reps as you can before the actual exam day.
Ohio's EFDA exam is one of the more stringent state versions. The infection control section on the written caught me off guard — there were questions specific to OSHA standard 1910.1030 that I didn't expect at that level of detail.
I passed both parts on my first attempt after 8 weeks of prep. For the written, the pharmacology section is small but dense — know the common local anesthetics, their duration of action, and contraindications. About 10-12 questions come from that area.
Six years of experience really helps for the clinical portion — you've seen all these procedures hundreds of times. The exam is mostly checking technique and protocol adherence, not whether you understand the underlying dentistry.
Honestly the biggest thing I changed was how I treated the calculation stuff. First time around I figured I'd just wing the math since I've been doing this hands on for years, and that was a mistake. I bombed the clinical portion and a chunk of it was me freezing up on dosage and dilution problems under the clock. Second attempt I drilled those every single day, even just 15 minutes before bed, and it made a huge difference. The repetition is what gets it into your hands instead of your head.
What actually helped me was grinding through practice questions instead of just rereading the course binder. I used pebc/questions/pharmaceutical calculations a ton because it threw the same kind of problems at me over and over until they stopped scaring me. The 40 hours of instruction isn't enough on its own, you already know that. Treat the course as the starting line, not the finish. And if you did fail the first time, don't spiral about it. I did, and looking back I knew the material, I just hadn't practiced it the way the exam wanted me to.