Leeds Dental School: Overview

Leeds Dental School is the only university in the UK to offer a joint bachelor's and master's degree in dentistry. With their carefully designed course and state-of-art cutting-edge facilities, Leeds University has been a world leader in dental education for many years, with a reputation for innovation and research.

Leeds has many things going for it as a place to live and study as a student. Not only is it more affordable than many other cities like London or Oxbridge, but it’s also very pretty (especially the Leeds University Campus). Besides, Leeds is a vibrant city with an excellent nightlife scene with plenty of pubs, bars and clubs to choose from!

Selection For Dentistry Interviews at Leeds University:

🔢 How does Leeds select for dentistry interviews?

GCSEs & A-levels: Your obtained and predicted grades won’t be scored, but only evaluated with regards to meeting the minimum entry requirements at Leeds.

Personal Statement: Your personal statement will be assessed and marked in the selection for the interview process. What is the admissions team at Leeds looking for in applicants’ personal statements? Have a look at their Personal Statement Guidelines.

BMAT: Everyone applying for dentistry at Leeds University is required to sit the BMAT (in one of the two autumn sittings).

You can read more about the selection process and entry requirements for dentistry at Leeds under this link.

📊 What is the BMAT cut-off score to get a dental interview at Leeds?

Unfortunately, in one of the FOI requests, the University of Leeds claimed that they don’t share participants’ BMAT scores so that aspiring dentists don’t aim for a score from previous years and try to trick the system. Therefore, it is not known what the BMAT cut-off score is for the Leeds dentistry course.

📤 When does Leeds start sending interview invitations?

In the past, Leeds usually sent most interview invitations in December and January of the application cycle.

📈 TOP Tip: Make your dentistry interview prep structured, fun and affordable - prepare using Dentfully (UK’s #1 All-In-One Dentistry Interview Prep Tool).

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Leeds Dental School Interviews: Number of interviews

For 2021 entry, 436 students applied for dentistry at Leeds and 284 have been invited to a dentistry interview (65%). Statistics from previous years show that around 450-550 students apply for dentistrey at Leeds each year and the top 250-300 are invited to an interview.

💡 How To Prepare for Dentistry Interviews at Leeds University?

Preparing for dentistry interviews requires a bit more work than just reading an article or doing a mock interview. To truly get better, more fluent and less nervous you need to do thorough research, and be consistent and committed. Luckily, we’ve created Dentfully to make the preparation process simpler than ever:

🦷 Leeds Dentistry Interview Questions:

What questions do interviewers at Leeds like to ask? Here are a few examples:

Insight into dentistry:

• What steps have you taken to see if dentistry is the right career choice for you?
• What are the 3 most important skills a dentist should have?
• In your opinion, what has been the greatest achievement in dentistry in the last 30 years?
• How do the roles of a dentist and a dental nurse differ? Why did you choose to become a dentist and not a dental nurse?

Personality:

• You have 3 minutes to sell yourself. The timer starts now!
• What would you like to achieve as a dentist?
• What is your greatest weakness?
• Applying for dentistry is really competitive and many great candidates don’t get in. How would you console a friend who got rejected from all the universities they applied to? How would you cope with a failure like this?

Empathy:

• What does the term empathy mean to you? Can you come up with an example clinical scenario when dentists need to show empathy?
• If you were to design empathy workshops, aiming to teach students how to be more empathetic dentists, how would you do it?
• Can you tell us about the last time you’ve shown empathy?

Analytic skills:

• Please describe the picture below:
• Under this link, you can find a graph that shows how much fear different dental procedures induce. Please describe what you can see on the graph and analyse any visible phenomena.

Ethical reasoning:

• A patient who is a heavy smoker comes to you and requests a dental implant. Would you give it to them, knowing that they may waste the resource?
• A 14-year old patient comes to your GP practice saying they don't want to undergo treatment for gingivitis. What factors do you need to consider when talking to the patient?
• You are a 5th-year dental student 3-weeks into a surgical rotation in a new hospital. While walking into the changing room, you notice one of the young dentists nervously placing a bottle into his locker. As they pass you by, you strongly smell the odour of alcohol. What would you do?

🚀 TOP Tip: Having a hard time answering any of the above questions? Find insider tactics that will help you construct a convincing and structured answer in our free interview guide - sign up at dentfully.co.uk and secure yourself a place at Leeds Dental School!

Please note that these aren’t questions that have been asked at Leeds Dental School in past years. Publishing such information would be against the policy at Leeds. The above questions are adjusted for the interview style at Leeds Dentistry and are meant to give you a broad sense of the questions you may face.

Leeds Dentistry Interviews (2023 entry):

🗓️ Leeds Dentistry Interview dates (2022):

Leeds dentistry interviews for 2023 entry will most likely take place in February 2023. You’ll receive the exact date, time and place of your dentistry interview with the invitation email.

🚀 TOP Tip: Don’t plan anything for the day of the interview! If you read into Leeds’ admissions policy, they will require you to be available for the entire morning/afternoon on the day of your dentistry interview.

💬 Interview format at Leeds Dental School:

Leeds uses the MMI interview format to evaluate all candidates. The MMI is short for a Multiple Mini Interview, which tells us all we need about the format - the dentistry interview at Leeds will consist of several mini-interviews, each with a different interviewer and held in a different room. Moreover, your performance on each station will be evaluated separately and then summed, unlike in a panel interview, where you are assessed on your overall performance.

In the MMI, you can expect 5-10 different stations, lasting anywhere between 5-8 minutes each.

Leeds dentistry MMIs are designed to assess if you have the skills, qualities and attitudes to thrive in dental school and become a great dentist afterwards. The questions and stations in the Leeds dentistry MMI are based on the NHS Constitution values-based recruitment. You can read more about the interview process at Leeds in the Admissions Policy document.

🏆 Leeds Dentistry Interviews: How many offers?

For the 2021 entry, Leeds interviewed 284 aspiring dentists and offered a place to 118 of them (42%).

⏳ How long does it take to hear back from Leeds University?

You should receive information about the outcome of your Leeds dentistry interview by the 31st of March 2023.

✅ Leeds Dental School Interviews: 3 Tips

📖 Know the 9 Standards

9 Standards for Dental Professionals is a document outlining all the rules and values that dentists should follow and have at their heart.

Reading the document carefully will help you gain a “clinical gut feeling” and help you formulate answers to questions about dental ethics or clinical scenarios. Moreover, making a reference to GDC’s 9 Standards will show that you’ve done your research, demonstrate commitment and definitely make a good impression (don’t try to force it into every sentence though!). Having said that, no one will expect you to learn them by heart, so don’t waste time trying to memorise them!

😄 Don’t forget to smile!

You should approach the dentistry MMI with the following aim - convince the interviewers to like me. After all, they wouldn’t accept someone who wouldn’t make for a good colleague or a friendly member of the student community!

And what a better way to get someone to like you than to wear a smile! Smiling while talking about your motivations for dentistry and for Leeds, or when talking about your achievements can exude more passion than any words. And it will also give the interviewers signals that you are a friendly, approachable person too!

🏋️ Practise, practise, practice!

Practise makes perfect, said Winston Churchill once asked about preparing for dentistry interviews. The more you practice, the more comfortable you’ll be on the interview day and the less nerve-wracking the day will be.

Once you learn a bit of theory, make sure to dedicate a lot of time to mock interviews. Ask your friends, family, teachers, pets, tutors etc. to help you. Try to mimic the real interview setting as much as you can. Give them a list of 7-10 questions, set a 3-5 minute timer for each one and try answering them in one sitting. Then ask them for feedback.

If you have no one to practice with, you can check one of our 5 Mock Interview Simulations. You can go through them at your own pace to see what the real interview feels like, what questions are asked and what the timing is like. Then you’ll have time and prompts to reflect on your performance so that you can get better with each next mock interview!

Good luck in your Leeds Dentistry Interview!