Beginning next year, some programs in the Sinclair division of Life and Health Sciences (LHS) will be trialing competitive admissions.
The Physical Therapy Assistant (PTA) program and Respiratory Care program will be piloting 100 percent competitive admissions processes starting in Fall 2012. Students that are already waiting on an eligibility list will not be affected by the change.
Several LHS programs already use partial competitive admissions, with a percentage of students gaining entry to programs “based on their academic excellence,” said Rena Shuchat, dean of the division.
The Accelerated Admission for Academic Achievement (AAAA) track allows talented students to skip ahead on the admissions lists for the dental hygiene, occupational therapy assistant, PTA, respiratory care and nursing programs. Usually up to 25 percent of a program’s incoming class consists of AAAA students, according to Shuchat.
Under the current system, other students in LHS programs need only pass a program’s prerequisites and maintain at least a 2.5 overall GPA. Students who meet these requirements are placed in the next available slot in the program. In some programs, the next slot can be two or three years away, said Deb Belcher, associate PTA professor.
“By the time we get two years down the road and contact them, they’re no longer interested,” said Belcher. “Things change in two or three years, and we knew there had to be a better way to do this.”
Some programs require outside clinical experience for completion, and program sizes are limited by the number of internships they can set up for students.
“We can only admit as many as we have internships, and there are only so many clinics,” said Belcher. “That’s really the limiting factor.”
Until recently, Sinclair’s administration would not allow 100 percent selective admission on the grounds that the mission of the college is to provide open and equal access to education, said Belcher.
“If a student is having to wait two or three years to get into a program, then we’re really not giving them open access anyway,” she said.
To make matters worse, some students wait several years only to find that they are not equipped to succeed in a program’s rigorous course of study. And because students are only admitted once a year and classes are sequential, unused open slots cannot be filled.
“Think about how frustrating it would be for a student to wait for several years to get into
a program, [then] get into the program and then fail out in their first quarter or two,” said Belcher. “Really we couldn’t admit more students than we do, but we lose a lot more students than we would like because with the open admission process we are getting students who…may not really have the capacity to be successful in the program.”
Shuchat hopes that the new program will improve graduation rates, which are part of the accreditation process for some external accrediting agencies.
“In order for students to be successful and complete, programs have found that students meeting a certain level of academic excellence are more likely to graduate,” she said. “So, for that reason we will pilot this admission option and determine if it positively affects student completion rates.”
The new competitive system will take into account a student’s GPA and the grades received in prerequisite classes, as well as how many times he or she has taken prerequisite courses.
“Some of them [students] are very happy about it and some of them are unhappy about it,” said Cynthia Beckett, chair of the Respiratory Care Department. “From here on out, it’s going to be much easier for individuals because they’re going to be informed up front about how important their grades in those [prerequisite] classes are.”
The division will eventually be initiating a pre-admission test that will identify students will greater ability in the life sciences, although the division is in the process of exploring how the test, which is used nationally and focuses specifically on sciences, will be applied.
“Our goal has always been student success,” said Belcher. “How can we make sure that the right students are coming to the right place for the right reasons?”