DESIGNING ADMISSIONS CRITERIA - A FRAMEWORK

When the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto decided to c onsider nontraditional criteria for the purpose of making admissions d ecisions, it was clear that a credible assessment framework would be n eeded for the task. The pivotal, related problems were: (I) that we wi shed to assess affective characteristics of applicants without the use of the traditional interview process that is used by many schools of pharmacy; and, (ii) that the assessment of affective characteristics f or selection purposes often is unreliable in that answers are easily ' 'faked.'' This paper describes the developmental process that was used , the criteria that were ultimately chosen and the outcomes of our fir st round of admissions using our new instrument. Ultimately, we found that a combination of the overall GPA, PCAT verbal and reading subscor es, the score on a problem-solving essay, and a structured self-assess ment item best predicted academic success in the first year of our new problem-based and practice-oriented curriculum.