Insights on selection of undergraduate dental students

Introduction: The goal of selection to dental education was to find those with the greatest aptitude for dentistry. Recently, schools have introduced a variety of tools; however, these have often been adopted without appropriate evaluation regarding existing evidence for fairness, reliability or validity. We explore dental admissions staff beliefs about the quality of different selection tools, with the objective of exploring their decision-making in implementing selection practices.

Methods: This qualitative study is underpinned by a social constructionist epistemology, in which our principal concern is "explicating the processes by which people come to describe, explain or otherwise account for the world (including themselves) in which they live." We conducted individual interviews with 15 of the 16 UK dental admission leads to elicit their views around admissions processes and aims. Data coding and analysis were initially inductive, using thematic analysis. After the themes emerged, we applied a deductive framework of affordances to group themes and then examined these for heuristics.

Results and discussion: We identified three main themes; "Selection Tool Use," "Widening Participation Practices," and "Professionalising the Admission Lead Role." Admission leads spoke favourably of tools that allowed a "holistic" view of the applicants "potential". Selection tools were favoured if they enabled "Gut feeling". Leads spoke of evaluating candidates, making sure they were "rounded", and "know what dentistry is all about." In justifying the use of elements of their procedure, the use of heuristics was prominent.

Conclusion: In order to minimise the potential consequences of poor selection decisions, it is important to acknowledge that dental admission leads are at risk of depending on sub-optimal heuristics to make judgements about effective selection (shaped by previous practices) rather than using more rational decision-making processes based on the extant evidence (regarding the quality of different selection tools). Future research may be usefully informed by the knowledge translation literature to offer solutions for improving selection practices in dental education.