Every admissions cycle begins with the same challenge: identifying applicants who are most likely to succeed.
For decades, colleges and universities have relied on familiar measures such as GPA, standardized test scores, prerequisite coursework, personal statements, and letters of recommendation to evaluate prospective students. These indicators remain valuable, providing insight into a student’s academic preparation and previous achievement.
But they don’t always answer one important question:
How will this student think when faced with a complex problem they’ve never encountered before?
As professional programs prepare graduates for increasingly complex careers, many institutions are expanding the conversation beyond academic achievement alone. They’re asking how to identify students with the reasoning skills needed to analyze information, evaluate evidence, and make sound decisions throughout their education and professional practice.
Academic Success Is Only Part of the Story
A strong GPA provides important evidence of what a student has accomplished academically. But it may not provide a complete picture of how that student approaches uncertainty, evaluates competing information, or reasons through unfamiliar problems.
Whether preparing future healthcare professionals, educators, engineers, or business leaders, today’s programs require students to do more than recall knowledge. They must apply information thoughtfully, adapt to changing circumstances, and make informed decisions in situations where there isn’t always a single correct answer.
That’s why many institutions are embracing a more holistic approach to admissions, one that considers not only what students know, but also the skills they’ll rely on throughout their academic and professional journeys.
Looking Beyond Traditional Admissions Metrics
Holistic admissions recognizes that no single measure tells the complete story.
Academic records remain an essential part of the admissions process, but many institutions also consider interviews, essays, recommendations, and other factors that provide a more complete picture of each applicant.
Critical-thinking assessments can provide standardized evidence of the reasoning skills students bring with them before they enter a program. Used alongside GPA, interviews, essays, recommendations, and other admissions criteria, these results can add another meaningful dimension to the admissions decision.
The goal isn’t to replace existing admissions practices. It’s to make them more informed.
Research Is Helping Advance the Conversation
As interest in critical thinking continues to grow, researchers are exploring how these skills develop throughout higher education and how they relate to academic and professional outcomes.
In their published study, “From Matriculation to Graduation: Examining Critical Thinking Development and Academic Success in Dental School,” the researchers examined critical-thinking performance across nine cohorts of dental students at multiple points from matriculation through graduation using the Health Sciences Reasoning Test (HSRT).
The researchers examined critical-thinking performance at different stages of dental education and its relationship to measures of academic and program performance.
The study found significant relationships between HSRT performance and multiple measures of academic and program performance. At different points in the program, HSRT scores were associated with measures including GPA, critical-reflection performance, and program learning outcomes. These findings provide useful evidence for institutions interested in understanding the relationship between critical-thinking skills, student performance, and development throughout professional education.
The Future of Admissions Is More Complete, Not More Complicated
Admissions decisions have never been more important.
Institutions are selecting future healthcare professionals, educators, business leaders, and innovators who will be called upon to solve increasingly complex challenges throughout their careers.
Traditional admissions measures will always play an important role. But as higher education continues to evolve, many institutions are recognizing the value of understanding another essential dimension of student potential: how students think.
By combining traditional academic indicators with a broader understanding of reasoning skills, institutions can continue building admissions processes that support student success from the first day of class through graduation and beyond.
Go Deeper: Critical Thinking Development Across Four Years of Dental School
Want to learn more about what Sandra M. Farah-Franco and her colleagues discovered?
Our first Research Spotlight takes a closer look at their work, including what the research found, what it revealed about critical-thinking development throughout dental education, and why the findings matter for higher education.
