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California RDA exam · Free practice questions
Five original RDA exam practice questions on patient information and assessment, each answered on this page with a rationale and a source.
Last updated 2026-07-25
Question 1 of 5
Answer A: The reading will be falsely high.
A cuff that is too small for the arm reads falsely high; a cuff that is too large reads falsely low.
Common trap: remember the direction — "small cuff, big number" — and note that an arm held below heart level also reads high.
Source: Bird DL, Robinson DS. Modern Dental Assisting. Current edition, Elsevier — the standard clinical dental-assisting reference used for Areas 1–3…
Question 2 of 5
Answer C: Inform the dentist immediately, before treatment begins, that the prescribed premedication was not taken.
Antibiotic premedication prevents infective endocarditis in the highest-risk cardiac categories, and a prosthetic heart valve is one of them. The assistant's operational duty is verification — confirm the patient actually took the prescribed dose before treatment starts and alert the dentist if not. Selecting, supplying, or prescribing the drug is impossible for any assisting category, because prescribing medication is on the never-delegable list in the Dental Practice Act.
Common trap: Option B feels efficient and even helpful, but handing a patient a drug is prescribing/administering territory the statute closes to assistants. Option A has the assistant making a clinical judgment about significance — that judgment is the dentist's. Option D routes around the dentist; unclear cases go from the dentist to the physician, never from the assistant.
Question 3 of 5
Answer B: Routine antibiotic coverage is not called for in most prosthetic-joint patients; the dentist decides unclear cases.
Premedication is condition-specific, not a blanket rule; the highest-risk categories are prosthetic heart valves or prosthetic valve-repair material, a previous episode of infective endocarditis, certain serious congenital heart disease, and cardiac transplant patients with valve problems. Routine coverage for most patients with prosthetic joints is no longer generally recommended, and questionable cases go from the dentist to the patient's physician. Deciding whether coverage is needed is diagnostic judgment the statute reserves to the dentist.
Common trap: This is a classic stale-prep item — the "all joints, forever" and "first two years" rules circulate widely in older assisting materials and dated study guides. Options C and D are also traps of a second kind: both have the assistant obtaining clearance or applying a rule independently, which is the dentist's call regardless of what the guideline says.
Question 4 of 5
Answer B: Re-confirm the allergy with the patient and convert to a latex-safe setup: non-latex gloves and non-latex dam.
Latex is the headline dental-material allergen and can appear in gloves, rubber dam, and prophy cups, with reactions ranging from contact dermatitis to life-threatening anaphylaxis. The sensitive patient gets a fully latex-safe setup, and standard references recommend early-in-the-day scheduling, when less airborne latex protein has accumulated from glove use. The health history is a living document re-confirmed at every visit, and every reported allergy is checked against the materials on today's tray before anything touches the patient.
Common trap: Option C is the most tempting because it half-solves the problem — but the rubber dam is a major latex source sitting directly against the mucosa. Option A treats the history as a one-time intake form rather than something updated and dated at every visit. Option D has the assistant recommending a drug, which is outside every assisting category.
Question 5 of 5
Answer A: Permissible: an RDA takes vital signs under general supervision, needing no dentist presence.
An RDA's authority to take vital signs comes from BPC §1752.4(a)(1), "all duties that a dental assistant is allowed to perform." Subdivision (a) duties are performed "under general supervision and pursuant to the order, control, and full professional responsibility of a licensed dentist," the Board's Table of Permitted Duties effective January 1, 2025 marks the §1752.4(a) rows G in the RDA column, and the stem expressly negates a §1752.4(d) determination — so ordinary extraoral vital signs are answerable here. Do not generalize that to every inherited duty: for the (a)(1) tier the current sources are not fully harmonized, and in January 2026 Board staff formally identified the inconsistency, with the Dental Assisting Council's working group agreeing that matrix work, post-extraction-dressing removal, periodontal-dressing removal, and suture removal should be direct for both DAs and RDAs — a legislative proposal, not current law (registry row B10). General supervision means the work rests on the dentist's instructions without requiring physical presence (BPC §1741(l)), so the standing instruction here is sufficient. Because the stem states that this dentist has made no §1752.4(d) determination raising the procedure to direct supervision, the general-supervision default controls.
Common trap: Option C is the error that runs through most circulating RDA prep: it reads the unlicensed dental assistant's rule — BPC §1750.1(b), which genuinely is the direct-supervision list — and applies it to a licensed RDA. For a DA, C would be right. Option B overcorrects in the other direction: general supervision is still supervision, and the dentist's order and full professional responsibility never lapse. Option D is simply false; vitals are delegable to every assisting category. Watch for the version of this stem that adds a §1752.4(d) determination — that fact, and only that fact, moves the answer to C.
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