The purpose of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the senior dental students for the proximal dental caries on intraoral radiographs and to compare it with the dental hospital residents, the reference group. It was also investigated the diagnostic performance according to the carious lesion depth. Thirty-five intraoral periapical and bitewing radiographs with 213 proximal surfaces included in this study were selected from the dental patients at Chonnam National University Hospital. The observers were 181 senior dental students from 5 dental schools and 40 dentists who were second year resident from 5 dental hospitals. They were asked to evaluate the presence or the absence of the proximal dental caries. The results were as follows: 1. The mean of the hitting rate for the overall observers was 184.51 surfaces and the diagnostic accuracy was 86.62％. 2. The diagnostic performance of the sound proximal tooth surfaces was very high, i.e., 91.5％ true negative rate and 8.5％ false positive rate. 3. The diagnostic performance of the dentist group was higher than the student group(P<0.05). 4. The proximal dental caries perceptibility increased as the lesion depth increased significantly(P<0.001) except no difference between the carious lesion depth III and IV (P>0.001).