Course Evaluation Evidence for Dental Accreditation (ADEE GED)

In short: Dental programmes in Europe are accredited or quality-assured by national dental competent authorities and general higher-education agencies, increasingly against the ADEE Graduating European Dentist (GED) framework. Reviewers want to see that student feedback is collected systematically, mapped to graduate competences, reviewed over time, and — crucially — acted upon. This guide maps those expectations to concrete course-evaluation outputs and shows how an AI-native platform like Koji produces standardised, longitudinal, closing-the-loop evidence for a dental self-evaluation.

Who accredits dental education in Europe

Dental education sits under two overlapping layers of oversight:

National dental competent authorities and regulators — for example, the General Dental Council in the UK and the Dental Council in Ireland — which approve or inspect programmes so that graduates can register to practise.
General higher-education quality assurance under the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), delivered by national agencies (many covered in our other accreditation guides).

Sitting across both is the ADEE Graduating European Dentist (GED) curriculum framework, developed by the Association for Dental Education in Europe. The GED traces back to the EU-funded DentEd thematic network more than 25 years ago, which set out to converge the profile and competences of a European dental graduate, the curriculum, and methods of quality assurance. In November 2023 the Federation of European Dental Competent Authorities and Regulators (FEDCAR) endorsed the GED for national use, recommending it as a reference to inform accreditation and quality-assurance processes and to promote comparability across schools. The Irish Dental Council adopted the GED as a basis for its regulatory framework in 2020, and recent European data collection (the Erasmus-funded O-Health-Edu project) found the GED is used locally by roughly 60% of responding schools.

An important nuance for buyers: the GED is explicitly aspirational rather than prescriptive. It does not mandate a specific curriculum structure or assessment method, and it was designed on a co-creation model of consultation and consensus. So your course-evaluation evidence should demonstrate how you use student feedback to enhance the programme against the GED domains — not that you tick fixed boxes.

The GED framework: five domains

The current GED framework expresses behaviour-based learning outcomes across five domains:

Professionalism
Safe and Effective Clinical Practice
Patient-Centred Care
Dentistry and Society
Research (added in 2024)

Good course-evaluation evidence lets a panel see the student experience through these domains — for example, whether students report growing confidence in safe clinical practice across their clinical years, or whether professionalism and patient-centred care are experienced consistently across placement sites.

What reviewers actually want from course evaluation

Across dental regulators, ESG-based agencies, and the GED ethos, the recurring evidence expectations are:

Systematic, comparable collection — feedback gathered the same way across modules, clinical rotations, and cohorts, so it can be aggregated and trended.
Alignment to graduate competences — feedback that can be read against the five GED domains, not just generic satisfaction scores.
Genuine student voice (ESG 1.1) — evidence that students actively shape the programme, consistent with the GED co-creation model.
Closing the loop — documented proof that feedback led to changes, and that those changes were communicated back to students.
Longitudinal enhancement — trends over time that show continuous improvement, not a single snapshot.
Defensible qualitative analysis — themes drawn from open comments in a transparent, repeatable way (dental cohorts are small, so anecdote is both tempting and dangerous).

Mapping accreditation expectations to Koji outputs

Accreditation / QA expectation	Concrete Koji output
Systematic, comparable collection across modules and clinical placements	Standardised AI-moderated interviews with a consistent core, run every cycle; bias-aware moderation keeps depth comparable across sites
Alignment to the five GED domains	Interview design and thematic tags mapped to Professionalism, Safe & Effective Clinical Practice, Patient-Centred Care, Dentistry & Society, and Research
Student voice and co-creation (ESG 1.1)	Verbatim, representative student quotes clustered into themes — auditable evidence of what students actually said
Closing the loop	Action-tracking log recording each committed change, its owner, and status, ready to export into a self-evaluation report
Longitudinal enhancement	Cohort-over-cohort trend reporting on themes and sentiment across clinical years
Formative, in-placement feedback	In-semester collection during clinical rotations, catching issues before they harm a cohort
Defensible qualitative analysis	Automatic thematic analysis across the whole cohort, reducing cherry-picking and coder bias

The through-line: a dental self-evaluation needs analysed, aggregated, longitudinal evidence — not a folder of raw survey exports. That is where an AI-native platform earns its place. The same conversational engine powers the main Koji platform for customer and user research; here it is tuned to the dental-education context.

Building the evidence portfolio

A practical sequence for a dental school preparing for review:

Design once, map to GED. Build a standardised interview whose themes map to the five domains, plus placement-specific probes.
Collect formatively and summatively. Run in-rotation check-ins and end-of-module evaluations so you have both early-warning and summative evidence.
Analyse into themes. Let automatic thematic analysis produce ranked themes with representative quotes, per module and per clinical year.
Act and record. Log the changes each committee commits to, and record how you told students ("you said, we did").
Trend and report. Assemble cohort-over-cohort trends into the self-evaluation, showing enhancement across the review period.

For the report itself, see our guide on the self-evaluation report and on mapping student feedback to ESG accreditation evidence.

A necessary caution: small cohorts and anonymity

Dental schools are small — sometimes 40 to 80 students per year. That has two consequences. First, quantitative per-item breakdowns can inadvertently identify individuals, so apply minimum reporting thresholds and lean on aggregated thematic evidence rather than granular tables. Second, qualitative depth matters more here than large-n dashboards: with small numbers, one probing follow-up that clarifies why clinics feel under-resourced is worth more than a mean score. Whatever tool you use, protect student anonymity and be transparent with students about how their feedback is handled.

When a simpler approach fits

Honesty serves this audience. You do not always need an AI platform:

If your school runs a small, stable programme and already has analyst capacity to read every comment, a free tool such as EUSurvey or your existing survey system may be sufficient for basic collection — see our Koji vs EUSurvey comparison.
Clinical competence itself is evidenced through logbooks, OSCEs, and portfolios, not course evaluation; do not make satisfaction surveys carry that weight.
If a hard on-premise data mandate rules out any external processor, a self-hosted open-source tool may be your only option — accept the manual analysis burden that comes with it.

Koji''s advantage is specifically in turning a large volume of qualitative feedback into standardised, longitudinal, closing-the-loop evidence with far less analyst time. Where that is your bottleneck, it is the stronger choice; where it is not, use the lightest tool that meets the standard.

Frequently asked questions

Does ADEE accredit dental schools?

Not in the hard sense. ADEE develops the Graduating European Dentist framework and quality-enhancement guidance; formal accreditation or approval of programmes is done by national dental competent authorities and, for general quality assurance, by ESG-based national agencies. FEDCAR endorsed the GED in 2023 as a reference for those national processes.

How does course evaluation map to the GED framework?

Design your evaluation so themes correspond to the five GED domains — Professionalism, Safe and Effective Clinical Practice, Patient-Centred Care, Dentistry and Society, and Research — so a panel can read the student experience against graduate competences rather than generic satisfaction.

What evidence do reviewers most often ask for?

Systematic and comparable collection, analysed qualitative themes with student quotes, documented closing-the-loop actions, and longitudinal trends showing enhancement over the review period.

How do we protect anonymity in small dental cohorts?

Use minimum reporting thresholds for quantitative breakdowns, prefer aggregated thematic evidence over granular tables, and be transparent with students about how feedback is stored and used. Small cohorts make re-identification a real risk.

Can course evaluation replace clinical competence assessment?

No. Competence is evidenced through logbooks, OSCEs, portfolios, and examinations. Course evaluation captures the student experience and perceived quality of teaching and placements — a complement to, not a substitute for, competence assessment.

Related Resources

Sources

Association for Dental Education in Europe (ADEE), Graduating European Dentist curriculum framework: https://adee.org/graduating-european-dentist/graduating-european-dentist-curriculum/information-and-advice
FEDCAR endorsement of the GED (2023): https://adee.org/news/fedcar-recommends-adees-graduating-european-dentist
Field J. et al., "The Graduating European Dentist Curriculum Framework: A 7-Year Review," European Journal of Dental Education (2025): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eje.13058

Course Evaluation Evidence for Dental Education Accreditation