DAANCE Pass Rate: Why AAOMS Doesn't Publish It (and What to Study Instead)

Every DAANCE candidate searches for the pass rate. It's the wrong question — but before we get to that, let's deal with the honest answer first.

The Official Answer: AAOMS Doesn't Publish It

Unlike nursing boards, the DANB, or the NBDE, AAOMS has never released an official DAANCE pass rate. There is no annual statistics report. No breakdown by first-time versus repeat candidates. No published cohort data. If you've spent time hunting for an authoritative number, you've already discovered this the hard way.

This isn't unusual for credentialing bodies that administer specialty exams — but it's frustrating when you're trying to calibrate how hard the exam actually is.

Why It's Not Published (Honest Speculation)

No one outside AAOMS knows the exact rationale. But a few factors likely explain it:

The cohort is small. DAANCE candidates are dental anesthesia assistants who have completed an AAOMS-approved training program. That's a narrow professional population compared to tens of thousands of annual nursing board test-takers. Publishing pass rates for small cohorts can expose training program performance in ways that create political complications.

It's a program-gated exam, not open registration. You don't walk in off the street and register for DAANCE the way you do for a Prometric nursing exam. Your access flows through your training program. That institutional structure means AAOMS may view pass-rate transparency differently than bodies administering open-enrollment credentials.

AAOMS treats it as a professional credential, not a public metric. The exam exists to protect patient safety in office-based anesthesia settings. The credentialing body's primary audience is oral surgery practices and training programs — not prospective candidates doing competitive research.

Whatever the reason: the number doesn't exist in any public document. Any site claiming to cite an "official" DAANCE pass rate is either fabricating it or misattributing something else.

What Community Anecdote Suggests

This is where the caveats matter, so read carefully.

Threads on r/DentalAssistant and comments in anesthesia-assistant-adjacent forums include self-reported accounts from candidates who passed or failed. Aggregating those threads — and taking into account data from practice-test platforms that track score distributions (not AAOMS-affiliated, and not statistically representative) — the community impression is that first-time pass rates fall somewhere in a rough range of 70–85%.

That number is:

• Not verified by AAOMS — they have not confirmed, denied, or commented on it
• Survivorship biased — people who passed are far more likely to post about it
• Self-selected — community forum participants are not a random sample of all test-takers
• Unaudited — practice platform score distributions reflect people who chose to use that platform, not the broader candidate pool

Treat that range as a rough orientation, nothing more. It does not tell you whether you will pass. It tells you that the exam is meaningfully difficult and that candidates who underprepare do fail it.

Why the Pass Rate Is the Wrong Question

Here's the core problem: even if AAOMS published an exact pass rate tomorrow — say, 78% — that number would not tell you a single useful thing about your own preparation.

A 78% first-time pass rate means roughly 1 in 4 candidates fails. But it doesn't tell you which candidates. Were they candidates who barely studied? Candidates who over-indexed on Basic Sciences and ignored Pharmacology? Candidates who couldn't do lidocaine dose math without a calculator? Candidates who sat the exam 3 weeks too early?

The population-level pass rate is a fact about everyone else. Your score on exam day is a fact about you. Those are different problems.

The only question that actually matters is whether you are ready — and that question has a measurable answer.

Better Questions to Ask

Replace "what's the pass rate?" with these:

What is my current mock exam score? If you haven't taken a full 115-question timed practice exam yet, you have no data to work with. Impressions from flashcards and comfort with the material are not the same as a scored exam result.

Is that score consistently above 75%? One good day doesn't establish readiness. You need two or more full-length practice exams showing consistent aggregate scores above 75% — ideally above 80% to give yourself a buffer. One practice exam is a data point. Two or more is a pattern.

Which domains are below 70%? A strong aggregate score can mask a failing domain. See the DAANCE domains ranked by weight — Pharmacology at 35% is the most consequential. A 65% domain score in Pharmacology will drag your total even if you're strong everywhere else.

Am I ready to sit now, or should I delay two weeks? This is a scheduling decision, not a willpower decision. If your mock scores aren't there yet, delaying two weeks to close a specific domain gap is smarter than sitting while underprepared and paying to retake. The exam fee isn't cheap. Two extra weeks of targeted study is cheap by comparison.

How to Measure Your Own Readiness

Stop estimating. Measure. Here's a concrete protocol:

Step 1: Take a full 115-question mock exam, timed, no calculator. This is the closest simulation you can create. The no-calculator constraint is non-negotiable — test day gives you none, so practice without one. Two hours, all 115 questions.

Step 2: Score by domain, not just overall. Your overall score matters, but domain scores tell you where to focus. A 79% overall that includes a 58% in Emergency Management is a problem. A 79% overall with all domains above 68% is a much safer profile.

Step 3: Apply the readiness benchmarks.

• All individual domains: 70% or higher
• Aggregate score: 80% or higher
• Consistent results across at least two full-length exams

If you're at 79% aggregate but one domain is at 62%, you're not ready to sit. You're ready to spend a focused week on that domain, then retest.

Step 4: If you pass the benchmark, schedule the exam within a week. Don't wait until you feel completely certain. Exam-ready candidates who keep delaying tend to see their scores drift as study fatigue sets in. Once your benchmarks are met, schedule and commit.

CertCleared's progress tracking breaks your performance down by domain automatically so you can see which areas need attention without manually sorting through question-by-question results. It's the fastest way to answer the readiness questions above rather than guessing.

What a "Good" Score Actually Looks Like Before Sitting

Since there's no public benchmark from AAOMS, here's a practical frame based on how the exam is structured: the passing threshold is approximately 75% on scored items (100 of the 115 questions count; the remaining 15 are unscored pilot questions). That means you need roughly 75 correct answers out of 100.

Building in a study buffer — targeting 80% or higher on mock exams, not 75% — gives you room for the normal variance that comes with real testing conditions: time pressure, unfamiliar question phrasing, and the occasional topic you studied but couldn't quite retrieve under pressure. Candidates who target exactly the passing threshold in practice often land just below it on test day. Candidates who target 80% in practice tend to land comfortably above the pass line.

The Only Metric You Control

The DAANCE pass rate — whatever it actually is — is a fact about other people. Your domain scores on a timed mock exam are a fact about you.

One of those two facts is actionable. The other is not.

If your Pharmacology score is at 65%, you don't need to know the population pass rate — you need to spend the next 10 days on drug classes, max doses, reversal agents, and dose calculations until that score crosses 75%. That's a concrete plan. The population pass rate gives you nothing to act on.

The candidates who pass DAANCE aren't the ones who found the most authoritative-sounding pass rate statistic. They're the ones who identified their weak domains, closed the gaps systematically, and sat the exam with mock scores that gave them real confidence — not false confidence, real confidence backed by data.

If you're not sure where your weak domains are, run a free diagnostic on CertCleared. It takes about 20 minutes and gives you a domain-by-domain score breakdown you can actually use. That's the starting point — not a pass rate you can't verify and wouldn't help you anyway.