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Chapter 7132Reflection I aimed to optimize undergraduate dental education and I searched for the ‘ideal’ education. Personal experiences with dental education together with reasoning and the things that I learned during my training and practice as sailing instructor, formed the starting point. I believe in learning for deep understanding, in transfer and in a student-centred approach that not only focuses on the end products that should be relevant but also on the processes that result in those end products. I believe in methods that Perkins described as ‘Educating for Insight’ (Perkins 1991).When I started this doctoral programme, I wanted students to learn and experience as much as possible during their undergraduate dental training, and my view on ‘the ideal’ was to set the bar high. This may fit quality education, where dental schools stand for. Academia, however, concerns more than education, scholarship and research. An academic centre is a business too, often with limited resources. Yearly, a new cohort of students arrives who should be educated within given timeframes. For the individual staff members, the education they provide usually could be summarized as ‘the best one could do under the given circumstances’. But, is that good enough? And what does it do to the dedicated staff when they continuously give the maximum that they can? Should they push themselves continuously this far, or is that not always necessary? Besides, is there no risk of a downward spiral when one just keeps conforming to the prevailing circumstances? To keep the ball rolling when there is a chronic imbalance between the number of students who need to be educated, the allocated time and the available teaching staff, one may need to set the bar lower to survive and to prevent escalation. Setting the bar too high may result in failure to fail (i.e. passing underperformance). When there has been too little time or supervision for the students to reach the set level of competence, teaching staff may feel responsible for the student’s underperformance and may compromise while assessing the student’s skills (Duffy 2003, Bush et al. 2013). Besides, it often is easier to pass students than to fail them (Bush et al. 2013). The assessor needs to be skilled to detect all cases of underperformance. It also necessitates extra time and effort from the assessor to fail a student (Scholes & Albarran 2005, Bush et al. 2013), and usually only the students who have failed request their assessors to substantiate their decision (Bush et al. 2013). Furthermore, the students who failed should be provided with additional training and assessment which means that they put an extra load on the resources (Bush et al. 2013). When there is an imbalance between the number of students and the available resources, repeaters may cause that this Annemarie Baaij.indd 132 28-06-2023 12:26