ADC Practice Paper 2025 — What the Official Sample Questions Reveal About the Real Exam

The Australian Dental Council has released only one official practice paper in its history. Here is everything it tells you about how the ADC thinks, what topics dominate, and how to use it in your preparation.

The only official ADC practice material that exists

The ADC Written Examination Practice Paper is the single most important document for any candidate preparing for the ADC exam. It contains 200 retired questions from the actual ADC item bank, grouped into 40 clinical scenarios. These questions were once used in real examinations. They will never appear again, but they are the only window into exactly how the ADC constructs its questions, what clinical reasoning it values, and how deeply it expects you to think.

The practice paper is freely available as a PDF from the Australian Dental Council website. If you have not downloaded it yet, do that now. Everything on this page assumes you have the paper in front of you.

Structure: how the practice paper maps to the real exam

The real ADC Written Exam has 280 questions across 4 papers of 70 questions each, sat over 2 consecutive days. Each paper is 2 hours. The practice paper's 200 questions cover the general dentistry scope (scenarios 1 through 27), shared dental hygiene and therapy scenarios (28 through 38), and dental prosthetics (39 and 40). For candidates sitting the general dentistry exam, all 40 scenarios are relevant.

Every scenario follows the same structure: a clinical vignette describing a patient with a specific presentation, followed by exactly 5 multiple-choice questions. Each question has a single best answer. This is the SBQ (Scenario-Based Question) format, and it is the only format the ADC uses. There are no standalone MCQs, no true/false questions, no short answers. Every question is anchored in a patient story.

Topic distribution: what the ADC actually tests

We analysed all 40 clinical scenarios in the practice paper to map which dental disciplines each scenario tests. Most scenarios cross multiple disciplines — a single patient might present with a restorative problem, a pharmacology question about their medications, and a radiology question about which imaging to order. This cross-disciplinary approach is deliberate. The ADC does not test subjects in isolation.

Here is how frequently each discipline appears across the 40 scenarios:

Three things this distribution tells you

Radiology appears in 60% of all scenarios. This does not mean 60% of the exam is about radiology. It means the ADC routinely embeds imaging decisions within clinical scenarios about other topics. You will be asked which radiograph to take, how to interpret findings, and when imaging is (or is not) indicated. If you are weak on radiographic interpretation, it will hurt you across every paper, not just the radiology questions.

Medical conditions appear in 15 of 40 scenarios. The ADC consistently tests whether you can manage dental treatment for medically complex patients — diabetes, hypertension, immunosuppression, bleeding disorders, Sjögren's syndrome. These are not standalone medical questions. They are integrated into restorative, surgical, and pharmacological decision-making.

Prevention and Public Health appears more than Prosthodontics. Many candidates focus heavily on prosthetics and operative technique while underweighting prevention. The practice paper shows the ADC cares deeply about caries risk assessment, fluoride recommendations, dietary counselling, and remineralisation strategies. Therapeutic Guidelines covers these extensively.

Question patterns: how the ADC thinks

Reading through the practice paper reveals consistent patterns in how the ADC constructs its questions. Understanding these patterns is as important as knowing the clinical content.

"Most appropriate" and "most likely"

The overwhelming majority of questions use phrasing like "What is the most appropriate management?" or "What is the most likely diagnosis?" This means multiple answers can be partially correct. The ADC is testing your clinical judgement, not your recall. You need to identify the best answer, not just a correct answer. This distinction catches candidates who studied from textbooks but did not practise clinical reasoning under the SBQ format.

Integrated decision-making

A single vignette might ask you to diagnose (oral pathology), image (radiology), treat (operative or surgery), manage medications (pharmacology), and handle a complication (medical emergency) — all for the same patient. The ADC does not test disciplines in silos. Every scenario is a mini-case that requires you to think like a clinician managing a real patient in an Australian practice.

Australian guidelines are the standard

The practice paper questions are anchored in Australian clinical standards, specifically the Therapeutic Guidelines (TG). Antibiotic prescribing, pain management, infection control protocols, fluoride recommendations — all follow Australian guidelines, which may differ from what you learnt in your home country. If the TG recommends a different antibiotic than what your undergraduate programme taught, the TG answer is the correct answer on the ADC exam.

How to use the practice paper in your preparation

Do not use it first

The practice paper contains only 200 questions. Once you have seen them, you cannot unsee them. If you use the paper before you have studied the core material, you waste its diagnostic value. Save it for after you have completed at least one full round through your study material and attempted other practice questions.

Simulate real exam conditions

The real exam gives you 2 hours for 70 questions, which works out to about 1 minute 43 seconds per question. Take the practice paper in blocks of 50 questions under strict time (about 1 hour 26 minutes per block). No notes, no textbooks, no phone. The practice paper is most valuable as a calibration tool, and calibration only works under realistic conditions.

Analyse your errors by topic, not just score

Getting 150 out of 200 correct (75%) tells you very little. Getting 4 out of 5 pharmacology questions wrong tells you everything. After completing the paper, map every incorrect answer to a topic. Identify whether you made errors because you did not know the content, because you misread the vignette, or because you picked a "correct" answer that was not the "most appropriate" answer. These are three different problems requiring three different fixes.

Cross-reference with Therapeutic Guidelines

For every question you got wrong, look up the relevant section in TG. The practice paper's answer key gives you the correct letter but no explanation. The explanation lives in TG. This is where your learning actually happens — not in getting the answer right, but in understanding why the ADC considers one answer better than the others.

What the practice paper does not tell you

The practice paper is invaluable, but it has limitations you should understand.

It is not a full exam. The real exam has 280 questions. The practice paper has 200. The topic distribution in the practice paper may not perfectly match the distribution in any given sitting. The ADC publishes an exam blueprint that specifies target percentages per discipline — use the blueprint alongside the practice paper, not as a replacement.

The difficulty may not be representative. The ADC states the practice paper contains "a mixture of scored and unscored questions which may have been included in examinations for the purposes of validation." Some of these may have been pilot questions that were later deemed too easy or too hard for scoring purposes. Your score on the practice paper is an indicator, not a predictor.

It does not cover the 2025–26 blueprint updates. The ADC periodically refreshes its exam blueprint. If topics like infection control or ethics have gained weight since these questions were retired, the practice paper will underrepresent them. Check the current blueprint on the ADC website for the latest weighting.

There are no explanations. The answer key tells you the correct letter. It does not tell you why. For a candidate who chose B instead of D, knowing the answer is D is not enough. You need to understand the clinical reasoning that makes D the best answer. This is where structured preparation — whether through TG study, coaching, or an adaptive system like Remy — becomes essential.

Frequently asked questions

Beyond the practice paper

The practice paper gives you 200 questions. The real exam has 280 per sitting, and you may need to sit it more than once. Two hundred questions are not enough to build mastery. They are enough to reveal your gaps.

Once you know your gaps, you need a system that targets them. That is what Remy does. Reviz tracks your performance across every knowledge unit in the ADC syllabus and adapts your questions based on where you are weakest. The topics you struggle with come back more often. The topics you have mastered fade into spaced review. Every question is a clinical vignette from Therapeutic Guidelines — the same source the ADC uses to write its exams.