DentPass vs Passmedicine: Should Dental Students Use a Medical Question Bank?

Most dental students who end up on Passmedicine did not choose it after comparing options. They chose it because their flatmate is a medic, the flatmate said it was the one everybody uses, and it is the only recommendation anyone had.

That is a reasonable way to find a product and a poor way to choose a syllabus. Passmedicine is a long standing fixture of UK medical revision and it has earned that place. The question is not whether it is good. It is whether the thing it is good at is the thing you are being examined on.

What Passmedicine is actually good at

Two things, and it is worth being specific about them because they are why it has lasted.

The first is the notes attached to the answers. Passmedicine's explanations are short, factual and dense, and a lot of medical students end up treating the bank as a textbook they happen to read through questions. That is a good design and it works.

The second is coverage of the medical syllabus. It is broad, it is maintained, and it is aimed squarely at UK medical assessments rather than an international average.

Neither of those strengths is transferable to a dental syllabus. A dense, well written note on the management of acute coronary syndrome is a dense, well written note about something no dental examiner will ask you.

The three ways this goes wrong for dental students

1. You revise the wrong depth

Medical and dental courses both teach cardiovascular physiology, and they examine it differently. A medical bank drills towards clinical management, because that is where a medical student is going. A dental paper is more likely to want the mechanism, the control of blood pressure, the oncotic pressure and the physiology behind the patient in your chair who has just gone pale.

Practising the medical version leaves you with a lot of knowledge pointed slightly away from the question.

2. You never see a dental stem

Exam technique is learned from the stems you practise on. A dental single best answer question tends to give you a patient, a dental context and five options where more than one is defensible. Getting good at those is a trained skill, and you can only train it on dental questions.

3. The distinctively dental half is simply absent

Oral biology, dental biomaterials, dental anatomy, oral microbiology, dental pharmacology, dental professionalism and the GDC standards you will register under. None of it is in a medical bank, and none of it is optional in your degree.

Side by side

	DentPass	Passmedicine
Built for	UK BDS students	UK medical exams
Syllabus reference	GDC core BDS curriculum	UK medical curricula
Shared biomedical science	Yes, written for dental papers	Yes, written for medical papers
Oral biology and dental materials	Yes	No
Head and neck anatomy at dental depth	Yes, plus a 3D atlas and image spotters	No
Question formats	Single best answer, short answer, image spotters, timed mocks	Question bank with concise notes
Free access	Free plan, no card	Subscription, see their site
Best for	Passing your BDS assessments	Passing medical assessments

The case for using it anyway

There is a real one, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

• Intercalation. If you are spending a year on a biomedical or medical science degree, the medical syllabus is your syllabus and Passmedicine is a sensible tool for it.
• Medical emergencies and medically compromised patients. You will treat patients on anticoagulants, bisphosphonates and steroids, and you will one day manage a collapse in your chair. A medical bank builds background here that a dental one covers only where it touches dentistry.
• Volume on shared topics. If you have worked through everything written for dentistry on renal physiology and want another two hundred repetitions, they exist there.
• Long term. If you are aiming at oral and maxillofacial surgery, general medical knowledge is part of the road.

The case against it as your main bank

• Most of what you pay for, you will never be examined on.
• The parts of your syllabus that students find hardest, oral biology and dental materials, are absent entirely.
• You practise medical stems and sit dental papers, and the mismatch shows up under time pressure.
• It gives a convincing feeling of preparation, which is worse than no preparation at all if the topics are the wrong ones.

What we would do

Use a dental bank for the syllabus you are examined on, and treat a medical bank as an optional extra for the specific overlap you have a reason to want. Not the other way round.

DentPass has more than 16,000 live questions across 127 topics, written against the UK BDS curriculum, in the two formats your papers use. Year 1 is complete, Year 2 is being written now, and there is a free plan that needs no card so you can check the fit against your own module handbook before paying anything.

Questions we get asked

Is Passmedicine useful for dental students?

Partly. It helps with the biomedical science dentistry shares with medicine, and it is a good background resource for medically compromised patients and medical emergencies. It does not cover oral biology, dental biomaterials, dental anatomy at the depth a dental school examines, or dental exam technique.

Does Passmedicine have a dental section?

Passmedicine is built around UK medical exams rather than dental ones. Product ranges change, so check their site directly, but you should not assume a medical subscription covers a BDS syllabus.

I am intercalating. Should I keep my dental subscription?

During an intercalated biomedical year a medical bank is the better fit for the exams in front of you. Whether to keep a dental subscription running alongside depends on whether you want to hold your dental knowledge steady for the year you go back, which is a real risk and worth planning for either way.

What is the main difference between DentPass and Passmedicine?

The syllabus. Passmedicine is a medical question bank written for medical examiners; DentPass is a dental question bank written for dental examiners, including the oral and dental subjects that do not exist in a medical curriculum, and in the short answer format dental schools use alongside single best answer.

See also: our full ranking of dental revision platforms, DentPass vs Quesmed and DentPass vs Anki.