BDS 2023 Course: Eligibility, Admission, and More

There are specific prerequisites that students need to have to be eligible for enrolling themselves in the BDS course. The first requirement is that a student must have passed the 10+2 examination. You need to opt for the Science stream after your Class 10 board exams. To be eligible for BDS admission, you must have Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and English in your 10+2 Higher Secondary course.

The BDS course eligibility criteria also require you to score at least 50% (40% for the reserved category) in your 10+2 exam. Candidates whose results are yet to be published are also eligible, provided they meet the score requirement once the results have been published.

Entrance Exams for Admission in the BDS Colleges

NEET 2023 (UG) or National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) is the BDS Entrance Exam you need to take to secure the coveted BDS degree.

Some of the top-rated dental colleges that fall under the purview of NTA’s NEET are the following:

• Maulana Azad Dental College and Hospital, Delhi.

• Govt Dental College and Hospital, Mumbai

• Maharashtra Institute of Dental Sciences and Research (Dental College)

• Gurunanak Institute of Dental Science and Research, Kolkata

• Pb Govt Dental College and Hospital, Amritsar

• Govt Dental College and Hospital, Jaipur

• Govt Dental Colleges in Kozhikode, Trivandrum and Kottayam in Kerala

• College of Dentistry, Indore

• Faculty of Dental Sciences, Lucknow

• Hazaribag College of Dental Sciences and Hospital, Jharkhand

This list is not exhaustive. Hundreds of dental colleges across the country offer BDS degrees where you can be admitted to be a BDS doctor with a bright future. 

BDS Dental Course Duration 

One of the first questions that come to the mind of the students opting for BDS is how many years they need to devote to passing the BDS course. In India, the BDS course duration is about 5 years. You have to devote 4 years to the study of dentistry, and then you need to take up a paid internship for a year.

The long BDS duration proves countless things to learn about the human dental anatomy. So, please do not be insecure about choosing dentistry as your career. It is a privilege to secure BDS eligibility. 

BDS Course Details

Let us delve deeper into the details of the BDS course and learn what happens during India's entire BDS course duration. Do you want to know what you will be learning each year of your BDS course? Here you go:

During the first year of your BDS course, you will learn about the general human anatomy, structure of tissues, prenatal stages of the human body and others. In short, you will be made aware of what a disease-free human body generally looks like internally. Dentistry does not only involve teeth and gums; these parts are very much connected to the rest of the body. 

In the second year, you will learn about injuries that happen to cells and tissues and the body’s natural mechanisms to fix those injuries. Again, you will learn about pharmacology - the study of which drug to give to minimise illness. You will also learn about materials used in dentistry, preclinical prosthodontics, and preclinical conservatives.

In the third year, you will delve deeper into using medicines to heal internal human organs. You will be studying oral and maxillofacial biology this year. Pathologies involving the jaws, mouth, teeth, and gums will be studied. Then you will learn how to mitigate these pathologies.

The fourth year focuses on dentistry alone. All aspects of dentistry are taught in this year. There will be around 8 subjects. This is the most hectic year in a BDS student’s life. 

Everything is thoroughly taught, from learning the bone structure of the facial region to the use of prosthetics in dentistry, from studying the pathological conditions involving the mouth and teeth to things that can be done to prevent these, from oral medicines treating a child and practised in this year.

In the fifth year, you need to take up a paid internship and visit clinics to get a practical idea about how to treat dental pathologies. The practical lessons learnt in this year are priceless.

How Much are the BDS Course Fees?

BDS course fees vary. If you get a good rank in NEET, you can enrol in government-funded (Central or State) institutions. The central or state government heavily subsidises the academic fees in these institutions. You will have to pay these institutions 8000 to 12000 Rupees per year. 

The fees get much higher if you want to join these institutions through the 15% All India NEET Quota. You have to shell out 60000 to Rs 2 lakhs per year. And as far as BDS course fees in private colleges are concerned, there are no fixed fees. The lower your marks are, the higher their fees!

In short, BDS course fees in Government College is much lower than BDS course fees in private colleges. BDS course fees in Government College being very low, there is a huge competition among students to secure a seat in these colleges.

So, study hard to get an excellent NEET score.