ADEA AADSAS Application 2026-27: Dates, Fees and Letters

Liaison's calendar says transcripts and scores stop matching February 10 at 5 PM ET. ADEA's overview says February 11 is the last day for official documents. Use February 10, the earlier date.

The Fee Assistance Program is closed for 2026-27 and reopens in April 2027 for the next cycle. Waivers are limited and first come, first served. Each covers your first three schools, worth $494, and approved applicants get 30 calendar days to use it. For income rules, Liaison points to ADEA's program page, so check there next spring.

Professional Transcript Entry costs $85 for 1 to 3 transcripts, $110 for 4 to 6 and $160 for 7 or more. Fee waivers do not cover it, and ADEA AADSAS no longer offers coupon codes.

Biographic and contact details, citizenship, race and ethnicity, and the Agreement Statement. This cycle adds a secondary email, a question about factors that affected your academic record and a question about responsibilities outside of being a student. Race and ethnicity now uses seven 2024 Census categories, including Middle Eastern or North African.

High schools, colleges, your coursework (entered by you or through PTE) and DAT scores.

Experiences, achievements, licenses, letters of evaluation and the personal statement. List only experiences from college, up to your top six per category.

Each school's own prerequisites, questions and requirements. Check our dental school requirements guide, then each school's page in the application.

ADEA collects no resume, so Experiences does that job. Applicants “should limit their entries to the top six experiences in each category.” Neither ADEA nor Liaison publishes a character limit for descriptions in the pages we read, so check the box in your portal.

• Academic Enrichment: programs run by colleges or nonprofits, such as SHPEP.
• Dental Experiences: shadowing, preferably a dentist. Name the type of dentist you followed.
• Employment: paid work outside dental care.
• Extracurricular Activities: college teams and activities.
• Research: projects beyond classwork that do not appear as credit on a transcript.
• Volunteer: unpaid work outside health care.

ADEA added both this cycle. Keep answers factual: what happened, what you did, what is different now. Be honest and do not over-explain. We wrote these. The applicants are invented.

Are there any factors that may have affected your academic record? In spring 2024 my father's surgery meant I drove him to appointments three days a week, and my grade in organic chemistry fell to a C. I retook the course after he recovered and earned an A-minus, and I have kept a 3.8 science GPA since.

Please explain any other responsibilities you may have outside of being a student. I work 20 hours a week as a pharmacy technician to pay my rent, and I take my younger brother to school each morning. That schedule taught me to plan my study weeks in advance.

The Agreement Statement also asks you to confirm your work is your own, “even if feedback is received from others, including artificial intelligence (AI).”

With PTE, specialists type your completed coursework from accredited schools. You still enter planned, in-progress and foreign courses yourself. It adds time: entry can take up to 10 business days, you then approve it, and verification can take up to 10 more. Self-entry costs nothing extra but carries the risk of mistakes. If your earliest deadline is close, enter it yourself and estimate your GPAs with our AADSAS GPA calculator.

We wrote this note. It is not from ADEA. Change the details to fit.

Hi Dr. Lee, thank you for writing my dental school evaluation! You will get an email from ADEA AADSAS with a link to the Liaison Letters portal, so please watch your spam folder too.

The portal has 13 required questions this year, including ratings on 10 attributes such as integrity and critical thinking. Choose Not observed for anything you did not see. You can upload a letter of up to 5 MB, ideally on letterhead and signed.

My earliest deadline is [date], so [date a few weeks earlier] would be perfect. I took your [course] in [term], and my resume is attached.

Liaison lists a college left out, all courses under one term, missing or wrong prefixes and course numbers, missing courses (often labs, PE, withdrawals, test credits and repeats), vague titles, unconverted credits, terms out of order and information that consistently does not match your transcripts. Misspellings, capitalization and up to 4 occasional errors do not trigger it.

Fix each item and click Re-Submit. Verification typically resumes within five business days of returning to Complete. Your submission date stays the same, but your complete date changes, so ask your schools whether that matters.

The second window runs December 1, 2026 to February 5, 2027. You need at least one school in Verified status by February 5, and you can update grades only once, so wait for final fall grades. Change the term to Completed in Transcript Entry, click Submit My Updates, and order new transcripts only after the confirmation email. Earlier transcripts will not count, and they must arrive by February 10. Verification can take up to 10 more business days.

Per ADEA, you can carry over personal details, experiences, achievements, licenses and academic history. You redo the release statements, personal statement, letters, program materials and school choices. The 2027-28 application opens May 11, 2027, so print your current one by May 10, 2027.

It opened May 12, 2026, with the first submissions on June 2, 2026. The cycle closes February 5, 2027 at 11:59 PM ET, and all processing ends February 12, 2027. Each school sets its own earlier deadline, and ADEA will not send your application to a school after that school's deadline.

Liaison lists $264 for the first school and $115 for each additional school, so five schools come to $724. Schools may add a supplemental fee. Canadian schools get a 25% discount, refunded in late April 2027.

ADEA says it usually takes about four to six weeks once your application, fee and official transcripts are in. Liaison's help center says verification takes up to 10 business days once your status is Complete. Plan around the longer number.

The prompt asks what motivated you to pursue a career in oral health. The limit is 4,500 characters, counting spaces, carriage returns and punctuation. It goes to every school and cannot be edited after you submit.

Up to four. ADEA's letters page allows one committee letter plus up to three individual letters, while its FAQ page says one committee letter plus one individual letter. Check each school, and ask ADEA AADSAS customer service if you plan to send a committee letter plus more than one other.

The American Dental Association sends them electronically, and paper copies are not accepted. Enter your DENTPIN in Other Information and your date of birth in Biographic Information so they match. If scores are missing at least four weeks after your test date and the ADA confirms it sent them, contact customer service.

Only in limited ways. You can edit contact details, add schools whose deadlines have not passed, add new evaluations up to the maximum and add new entries in some sections. You cannot edit the personal statement or existing experiences, though you can add new ones.

Texas residents applying to Texas dental schools use TMDSAS. Foreign-educated dental graduates applying to advanced standing programs use ADEA CAAPID.