This research aimed at assessing the moral competence of dental students in the state of Ceará. This was a cross-sectional, observational and descriptive study. We applied the Moral Judgment Test (MJT) with students enrolled in the first and last semesters of state dental courses and for the analysis of the learning environment, we collected the contents of the disciplines and internships of all Institutions involved for a consolidated account of study hours. As the dependent variable we assessed the cognitive aspect - moral judgment competence evaluated by MJT and expressed by C score. As independent variables: a) type of institution; b) learning time; c) gender; d) age. For the assessment of statistical significance between gender, semester and type of institution, we calculated the difference of means, by the t test. The ANOVA test was used to assess the differences between age groups per semester. The results show that the average moral judgment competence (C score) of respondents was 18.3, with no significant difference between genders. Analyzing the average competence of students in the first and last semesters per institution resulted in a trend of loss of competence from the first (19.0) to the last semester (17.6) and a significant difference between students from public institutions (21.0) and private ones (16.5). It was also observed that the disciplines with human sciences content did not exceed 20% of the pedagogical projects, conditioning future dentists to develop limited moral competence.
Teaching; Dental Ethics; Moral Development; Dentistry