So I got FAGD' last weekend and wanted to give my two cents on how the experience went.
Overall my thoughts on the prep course are of two minds. First - yes, it was good to review the material as I would have not done such a thorough job on my own. Second, I found the course not to be what I expected at all. Let me elaborate.
After dental school finished, I sort of became complacent in a sense that there were no deadlines, no tests, no practical exams, no boards, all was behind. I could finally breathe easy. My only mark of success was realistically the bank account. All the artificial hoops were over and hello the real world and capitalism. The pattern that quickly emerged after graduating the dental school was: if you wants specialized knowledge, you pay for it - no one cares if you actually learn it or not - as long as you pay the piper, you get the credits. The more you pay, the more letters you add. To make things seem more official, some organizations put up artificial barriers that are not at all too difficult to overcome. The dentist then pride themselves on adding letters to their name and questionable amount of knowledge.
I am not involved in political arena of the profession, so to me AEGD mainly offered a convenient way to track my progress in accumulating additional hours and later on adding a fancy sounding "Fellowship" to my online profile. The requirement is accumulating X amt of hours in one X amount of disciplines and passing an exam. Oh... the exam... Thinking it was just another hoop to jump through, I faithfully paid my dues in anticipation of what I thought would be another semi-serious artificial hoop to jump through. Oh was I mistaken....
Don't know who sits on the board of the organization to come up with this ridiculous examination, but here it goes. First the review questions that you can purchase from years before are a total waste of money. Firstly, the information gets updated yearly and old knowledge becomes obsolete, the the questions don't repeat on the exam, so don't expect to see them again. They apparently rewrite all the exams every year.
And as for the exam itself - the knowledge they test is very close to board examination. All sounds official on the paper and well, but in reality - as we have all discovered shortly after graduation, the real world is totally different from the book world and problems we face day to day are not at all representative of what boards test you on, thus begs a question - why format the exam in fashion similar to that for a fake credentials? Gets better. So sure, keep your fancy ridiculous questions as if you are trying to test out the best of the best, but no! The exam is graded and THEN they want the members to keep paying the dues, right? You didn't think they are really there to test if you qualify to be eligible to carry the F.A.G.D. credentials behind your name based on your academic merit? NO! You get your score and get awarded a degree based on a curve. So there you have it. If you have a cohort of monkeys take the exam and randomly answer questions, at least 50% of them would be awarded the FAGD credentials to keep those Benjamins rolling in. 🙂
So there you have it, my dental assasins. For what it's worth is my experience of getting FAGD'.
C-Bug, FAGD ;o)
