Admission criteria for Canadian dental hygiene programs.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective: The purpose of this project was to understand the variation in admission criteria to Canadian dental hygiene programs and determine whether the criteria are appropriate in predicting a program's success rate on the National Dental Hygiene Certification Exam (NDHCE). Methods: Admission criteria were gathered from the websites of English-language dental hygiene programs in Canada. Individual dental hygiene programs were also contacted directly by phone or email if their admission criteria were not outlined on the program website. NDHCE success rates for each program were collected from the National Dental Hygiene Certification Board website. The association between the admission criteria and NDHCE success rates was examined. Pearson's product moment correlations were performed for post-secondary credits required for admission and program length. Results: Admission criteria for 29 of 30 dental hygiene programs were examined. Twenty-two programs accepted applicants directly from high school. The average program length was 83.7 weeks. Four programs offered post-diploma baccalaureate degrees in dental hygiene; one program offered a direct entry-to-practice degree program. Twenty-two (22) of the 29 programs utilized academic grades (including overall and/or prerequisite GPA) as admission criteria. Twelve programs included interviews in the admission process. A moderate correlation was observed between the number of postsecondary credits required for admission and NDHCE success rates (r = 0.6723). A weak correlation was found between program length and NDHCE success rates (r = 0.1797). Conclusion: Academic performance as an admission criterion, including overall/prerequisite GPA, was the most common criterion used by dental hygiene programs. Graduates from programs that required more postsecondary credits tended to perform better on the NDHCE. The higher success rate may be attributed to the rigour of the prerequisite courses, which may prepare students for dental hygiene studies and ultimately success on the national examination. In addition, students with more postsecondary coursework may be better adjusted to studies at a postsecondary level and/or be more experienced at taking examinations.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".