Admissions processes at the seven United Kingdom veterinary schools: a review

The major challenge in veterinary undergraduate admissions is to select those students with most suitability for veterinary training and careers from a large and diverse pool of applicants with very high academic ability. This paper describes a review of the admissions processes of the seven veterinary schools in the UK. There was significant commonality in the entry requirements and the criteria upon which the schools made decisions on candidates. There was some variation in the procedures used by individual schools to select candidates, but common themes existed within these processes. All of the schools evaluated both academic and non-academic factors for individual applicants, and all used interviews in some format as a selection tool after an initial short-listing process. The procedures and approaches to selection processes are compared and discussed.