Understanding glass formation and predicting glass forming ability (GFA) are vitally important and they are long-standing challenges in the metallic glasses community. Recently, a number of criteria have been developed to evaluate GFA, based mainly on fitting the experimental data of the critical cooling rate for glass forming. In this study, physically accepted boundary conditions have been imposed to evaluate the GFA criteria, and their combination with statistical analysis result in identifying the best GFA criterion useful for various glass forming systems, including oxide glasses, cryoprotectants, and metallic glasses. ; Department of Mechanical Engineering