Background/Introduction: Assessment of burnout and its relationship to sociodemographic characteristics among undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate dental students is essential to study students' academic performance. Objectives: This research aimedto assess the frequency of Burnout Syndrome among undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduate dental students of a private university. Materials and method: The present study is a descriptive cross-sectional survey conducted among conveniently selected 406 dental students from a private university. The study subjects included preclinical (120), clinical (174), intern (71), and postgraduates (41) dental students of Riyadh Elm University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Result: The interested participants were given a self-administered, structured questionnaire with ten sociodemographic characteristics and 15 Maslach Burnout Inventory Student Survey (MBI-SS) questions in Arabic and English. Statistical analysis included frequency distribution, mean and standard deviation values. In addition, an independent t-test, one-way analysis of Variance (ANOVA) followed by Turkey's multiple comparison tests, were applied to the data. The level of significance was set at a p-value < 0.05. Conclusion: The increased academic burden and the cumulative stress of clinical requirements may have resulted in a higher level of burnout among clinical level students than preclinical dental students.
Keywords: Burnout, dental students, Maslach burnout inventory