Cognitive Styles and Student Selection Process for Tertiary Education in Erbil City

The student selection process is of paramount importance for optimizing the academic performanceof students and colleges. For effective and evidence-based student selection, factors beyondintellectual capacity, such as cognitive style, must be considered. According to the Empathizing-Systemizing theory, individuals can be classified as 'systemizers' or 'empathizers' based on their cognitive style. Systemizers excel at predictable, systematic thinking, which is suited for fields like mathematics and physics. Empathizers are proficient in understanding social phenomena and typically succeed in fields involving significant human interaction, such as language. Individuals with comparable systemizing and empathizing abilities are classified as 'balanced'. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the student selection process in Erbil city effectively directs systemizers and empathizers into their cognitively suited academic fields. A cross-sectional study was conducted to measure the systemizing and empathizing abilities of 518 students from science, medical, and humanities colleges in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. Students were selected using clustered sampling, and a questionnaire was used to assess their cognitive styles. The final analysis included 93% of the distributed questionnaires. The findings indicated that each academic discipline—sciences, humanities, and medicine—comprised approximately one-third of each brain type (S, N, and E). There was no statistically significant difference in the proportion of brain types across these disciplines (p = 0.968). This suggests that a student's brain type does not statistically predict their probability of entering a cognitively suitable academic field. The study's results suggest a defective student selection process in the universities examined, which appears unable to direct students with particular cognitive styles to their appropriate fields. These findings can be partially generalized to other state colleges in Slemani and Duhok, as their students have followed similar academic pathways.