The purposes of this study were (1) to introduce a virtual dental lab designed to support students' virtual clinical examinations in a dentistry program in South Korea and (2) to determine how dental students' levels of expertise (low, medium, or high) influence their clinical performance in terms of dwell time on each tooth location, total examination time, and perceived task load in the virtual dental lab. A total of 93 students participated in the study. Participants were assigned to one of three groups based on their expertise levels and performed virtual reality simulation tasks of detecting and diagnosing dental caries in two clinical cases. The outcome variables were participants' clinical examination performance (total dwell time on the virtual dental mirror and total examination time) and perceived task load (separated into six subcomponents: mental demands, physical demands, temporal demands, effort, performance, and frustration). The results suggest that the level of expertise significantly affected the performance of dental examinations in all areas except the anterior maxillary teeth. Both total dwell time on the dental mirror and total examination time were significantly shorter for the high expertise group than for the medium and low expertise groups. In addition, the high expertise group rated task load significantly lower for mental demands (p < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.70) and effort (p < 0.05, Cohen's d = 0.75) than did the low expertise group.