Estado ansioso previo a una evaluación en estudiantes de odontología

Objective: To relate anxious state and severity of anxiety with academic performance, prior to an assessment in third year students of the Faculty of Dentistry, Universidad San Sebastián, Concepción, during the academic period 2015. Materials and Methods: This exploratory cross-analytical study has a sample of 138 students. The Hamilton Test was applied in the third year of the Pre-clinical and Oral Rehabilitation course to those who wanted to participate after signing an informed consent. Data were analyzed to see whether there were significant differences in the presence of anxious state and severity of anxiety according (ANOVA) simple classification (Model III) for unbalanced data and compared by Tukey method. The level of significance was α≤0.05. Results: The means of academic performance and the means of the anxious state do not differ from each other (p = 0.188). Severe anxious state shows a lower performance value than the other ratings. With regard to sex and anxious state, these were equally distributed among subjects (χ² = 1.57, p =0.21). Conclusions: It is not possible to directly relate anxious state to academic performance. However, the presence of severe anxiety is associated with lower academic performance.