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.