658A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS VERSUS SHORT ANSWER QUESTIONS AS AN EVALUATING TOOL OF THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN DENTAL MICROBIOLOGYIntroduction- Assessment is an integral part of the students learning process. MCQ are the common type of assessment tool in students. SAQ are another method of evaluating students performance. This study is designed to analyse the performance of high achievers to low achievers using MCQ and SAQ as assessment tool in students of dental microbiology. Methods- It is an observational comparative study where 92 second year BDS students were enrolled. Part 1 included theory papers with 15 SAQ out of which 10 were to be solved in 30 minutes.Part 2 included 20 MCQ based on the syllabus given with four options and one best answer to be picked. The evaluation of the answer sheets was done by the faculty. Tha data analysis was performed by using python programming language (version 3.5.2)Results- out of 92 students enrolled for the study 31 students did not attend due to absence.61 Students completed the study. Analysis showed a significant correlation between MCQ and SAQ.In overall students for MCQ 95.08% achieved >75 %marks and in SAQ 77.04% achieved >75% marks.Discussion- The above results depict that the more number of student show high score in MCQ while the low score was observed by the student in SAQmicrobiopharma@yahoo.comResearch922019MCQ,SAQ,Evaluating Tool,dental microbiologyJanhavee Satish Hote,Sabiha Saleem Tamboli3rd year Dental Student, Nanded Rural Dental College and Research Centre, Nanded, Maharashtra, India.,Professor and Head, Dept. of Microbiology, Nanded Rural Dental College and Research Centre, Nanded, Maharashtra, India.