Recently dental students have experienced considerable stress because of the in­ creasing difficulty of the Japanese National Dental Examination. We investigated how students handled this stress. The students in the sixth year at Osaka Dental University were given a questionnaire in 2015 with 36 items, including how they handled stress during their graduation examination. In this study with the results of the examination being a dependent variable, a sig­ nificant difference test was conducted between the pass group and the fail group for the 36 items. Of the 140 sixth year students, 73 passed. Significant differences were found between the two groups in 10 of the 36 questions. Discriminant analysis indicated that the factors of com­ prehension, coping and the avoidance strongly correlated with whether the student passed or failed. The correct answer rate by the linear discriminant function was 66.7% in the pass group. Shika Igaku (J Osaka Odontol Soc) 2017 ;September ;80(2) : 67­-73.