Socio-demographic predictors of admission to Bachelor of Physiotherapy Programme: a retrospective cohort study.
Emanuela De Martino, Federico Temporiti, Paola Adamo and 3 others
Students from scientific high schools were more likely to be admitted to this Italian physiotherapy programme and scored higher, regardless of whether the test emphasised logical reasoning or scientific knowledge.
Gender and region also played a small role. The predictors explained very little of the variation in scores.
Key findings
1High-school type, gender, and geographic origin were independent predictors of admission, but the model explained only a small portion of the variation (R²-McFadden = 0.04, R²-Nagelkerke = 0.06).
2Candidates from scientific high schools had higher total and scientific-knowledge scores than those from non-scientific or technical-professional schools, and were over-represented among admitted candidates in every test cohort.
3Changing the proportion of logical-reasoning versus scientific-knowledge questions in the admission test did not alter the socio-demographic profile of admitted candidates.
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What it does not show
Single Italian university, so the findings may not generalise to other countries or even other Italian institutions with different test designs. Socio-economic status, parental education, prior academic grades, and school quality were not measured, so the authors cannot rule out that these unmeasured factors drive the observed differences. The sample size was not estimated a priori, though the events-per-variable ratio (40) exceeded the commonly cited threshold of 10–20. Missing data were concentrated in 2017 and 2019 and were handled by complete-case analysis; a sensitivity check was performed but the distribution of missingness differed across cohorts. The effect of test content (logical-reasoning vs scientific-knowledge proportion) cannot be fully separated from year-cohort effects because the test changed only once per year. The number of candidates from Southern Italy was small, which may have inflated the observed regional differences.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest and state they did not receive external funding for this study.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the significant odds ratios for high-school type and gender as proof that the admission test is unfair or biased. The model explained only 4–6% of the variation in admission (R²-McFadden = 0.04, R²-Nagelkerke = 0.06), and the authors note that key variables such as socio-economic status and prior academic achievement were not measured. The observed associations may reflect differences in school preparation rather than a defect in the test itself, and the single-institution, single-country design limits how far the conclusion can be extended.
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