Current outlook of graduate studies in dentistry.

The Brazilian National System of Graduate Studies currently has 2,748 Courses/Programs distributed in nine major areas: Agricultural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Health Sciences, Earth and Exact Sciences, Humanities, Applied Social Sciences, Engineering, Linguistics, Arts and Letters, and Interdisciplinary Sciences. The major area of Health has the greatest number of Courses/Programs (n = 452), followed by the major areas of Humanities (n = 394) and Applied Social Sciences (n = 348). The major area of Health is made up of eight areas: Physical Education, Nursing, Pharmaceutics, Medicine I, Medicine II, Medicine III, Dentistry, and Community Health. The area of Dentistry has the greatest number of Courses/Programs (n = 95), followed by Medicine II (n = 86) and Medicine I (n = 72). Graduate Courses/Programs are geographically concentrated in the Southeast (n = 1,374) and South (n = 553) Regions. This same trend is observed for the Graduate Courses/Programs in the major area of Health and, when analyzing only the area of Dentistry, a similar distribution is observed: 63 Courses/Programs are offered in the Southeast, 16 in the South, 12 in the Northeast, 3 in the North and one in the Midwest. Regarding the degrees offered by the Courses/Programs, most of them are Doctorate Programs (n = 1,426), and there are 253 Professional Master Programs in the country today. In the major area of Health, 291 are Doctorate Programs, 1,080 are Academic Master Programs and 41 are Professional Master Programs. Considering solely the area of Dentistry, there are 52 Doctorate Programs, 25 strictly Academic Master Programs and 18 Professional Master Programs. The percentage distribution by regions can be seen in Graph 1. In terms of their ratings, most of the Graduate Courses/Programs are rated with a grade of “3” (n = 1,088) and “4” (n = 903). Similarly, the Courses/Programs in the major area of Health and in the area of Dentistry received grades of “3” and “4”. Today there are 37 Courses/Programs in the area of Dentistry with a grade of “3”, 32 with a grade of “4”, and 22 with a grade of “5”. Four programs are rated as having international excellence, 3 of which received a grade of “6” and one of which received a grade of “7”. For the triennium 2007-2009, the rating process will maintain the five-criteria evaluation system adopted in the preceding triennium: 1) Proposal of the Program; 2) Faculty; 3) Student body, Theses and Dissertations; 4) Intellectual Production; 5) Social Insertion. Nevertheless, one of its goals is to improve the standardization of the evaluation scorecards used by the different areas, minimizing the discrepancies in attribIsabela Almeida Pordeus