Dental Education in Syria: A Kafkaesque Scenario | ||||
| Journal of Health Professions Education and Innovation | ||||
| Article 4, Volume 1, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 36-37 PDF (385.36 K) | ||||
| Document Type: Learners/educators voice, and commentary. | ||||
| DOI: 10.21608/jhpei.2024.248235.1000 | ||||
 View on SCiNiTO | ||||
| Author | ||||
Ghaith Alfakhry  
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| Department of Education, University of Oxford. | ||||
| Abstract | ||||
| In my first year as a dental medicine student at Damascus University, I was asked to cut in half a number of extracted teeth as part of my tooth anatomy module. After finishing my first tooth, I handed it in to the lab supervisor who signed my clinical card and marked it with a “Z minus”. Of course, I asked him what this grade letter means and about the quality of my work but he dismissed me without addressing either of my questions. This scenario was repeated multiple times during my dental education and is still, until today, a common practice at Damascus University Dental School. I later learned that supervisors have their own codebook for grades that they are not allowed to share with students. But why? I asked myself this question on several occasions and even asked the supervisors, who as it turns out, do not know the exact reason. It was the dental school policy that the student stays blind of his/her grade on any assessed task. This situation and many other lived experiences during my dental training struck me as really Kafkaesque; I was being judged by people I do not see, by rules I do not know and the tragedy here is that I did not know the judgement until very later. This became a serious issue for me and my other peers, especially during clinical years in which we have the responsibility of treating a large number of patients. | ||||
| Keywords | ||||
| dental education; assessment; Syria | ||||
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