Cambridge Degrees

The thing about Cambridge is that once you get there you realise that everyone is at least as clever and mostly cleverer than you. I found that quite liberating and did lots of other stuff and enough work to get by. That was in 1985 . As a secondary school teacher of 27 years I have seen the increasing levels of perfectionism and anxiety in students. Our Oxbridge lot are a mixed bag - some super bright ones that thrive on it and sail through and some who struggle.

Perhaps she got a 2.1 in her mods, though?

good mathematicians don't necessarily make good teachers

Yeah... back in the day when we were doing our chemistry degrees, sensibly there were two maths groups depending on whether you'd done (well) A level maths. Unfortunately the professor for the 'hard maths' would jump large sections of explanation as being 'intuitively obvious'.

It's definitely subject dependent.

I'm not particularly bright and did next to no work at all - I did have to read a lot as it was an arts subject and I got a 2:1 despite the fact that in one of my final papers, only one topic I studied came up, so I wrote 2 hour long essays on subjects I had attended 1 lecture on. Given I scored 67% in that paper, but on the one paper I revised for I scored a lowly 56%... I concluded the marking was highly peculiar.

I have taught 2 students who went on to Cambridge to study Maths who felt similarly (and one more who coped well). One of the 2 said that his love of Maths was gradually sucked out of him, which I think is really sad.

My DD1 studied NatSci and I have to agree with a poster who wrote that good mathematicians don't necessarily make good teachers. DD found one of the 1st year Maths lecturers completely incomprehensible. In her supervisions, the supervisor said he had had complaints about this particular lecturer in previous years. DD dropped Maths after her 1st year. DD managed a pretty good work/fun balance throughout her 4 years: rowing, orchestra, chapel choir, dance and football all featured, but not all at the same time.

That should be ex-girlfriend - only one of them thankfully 😅

My brother's ex girlfriends studied maths at Oxford.
When the results came out, he checked on hers (as you do). She got a third.
Immediately afterwards, she told him (and everyone else) that she got a 2:1
She also fed that lie to her employer.
It was probably even easier to feed the same lie to subsequent employers.
She is now head of a large PLC and gave a few interviews in graduate brochures where she mentions her 2:1 😅
My brother dumped her without bringing up this reason.
She eventually married a guy who was on her course who bafflingly believes that she got a 2:1. Her teenage kids seem to believe she got a 2:1

Sometimes, it feels like we are helping her keep a secret that she will take to her grave, just that she does not even realize.

Ha ha. One of my final exam questions was simply:

The Death of Art.

I was set 70-80 hours a week in my first two years, in an arts subject. I only managed it by not going to lectures, which were about 15 hours a week, so I could use that time to do the set work each week. There was very little intellectual discussion or rigour, essays were never marked or commented upon, sexist comments were thrown about by tutors (this was in the nineties and they weren't used to us being there, some openly didn't like it).

I switched to another arts subject and got a good 2.1 while very stoned, suicidally depressed, drinking heavily and with an average just 15 hours' work a week (I counted the hours rigorously).

I couldn't get beyond a GCSE in maths, though! :)

That's why I said 'almost'.

But that's supposition - maybe he couldn't. A matho in my year failed first year exams and went to a very respected Russell Group to complete his degree but only got a 2:2 there.

Yes - with the caveat that he almost certainly could have got a First for maths at most other unis.

Some people at any university are going to work their arses off and still get a 2.1.

Isn't the point that getting a first is meant to be an indication of ability well above the norm - so most people couldn't get one even if they did work really hard. It ought to be possible for most to get a 2:1 with hard work but a first should demonstrate an aptitude for the subject above and beyond the slog? SO the undergrad cited in the OP presumable just doesn't have that flair for the subject so a 2:1 is essentially his threshold?

TBH that sounds like a student grappling with not being top of the class anymore.

I might have said the same about my Further Maths A level. Maths A Level - a doddle. Further Maths - might as well have been written in hieroglyphs for all I understood it. And yet one girl in the class could mysteriously answer everything correctly, and yes she did go on to Cambridge.

Some people at any university are going to work their arses off and still get a 2.1.

Would people be better equipped for Cambridge If they already had an excellent grasp of the various subject first?

That is just not how maths works.

Cart before the horse, OP? It is very difficult to learn maths to Cambridge standard on your own

That was impression from whenever someone in another subject asked me to help them with a maths problem.

An engineer in the year below me once asked how to do an integral, which needed a simple trig substitution. I couldn't get my head round how someone had done at least A level maths and not been shown that, genuinely thought they were joking with me at first. It's the kind of trick you either know or you don't, trying substitutions and seeing a solution neatly fall out is not something I expect many students just figure out without being shown a few common ones to try.

I've seen some very strong mathematicians struggle to keep pace when they move to a new school/college/uni and there's no awareness of the gaps in their knowledge. This is one of the major ways people come unstuck with maths in my view, figuring out where the holes are and filling them in. There are plenty of students who crash and burn when they try to do further maths, especially if they have come from another school where the GCSE teaching was not as strong as their new peers got.

I do think a lot of people doing maths at uni will eventually find themselves bumping up against limits to their understanding, it's possible to get a first at Cambridge even though plenty of courses were a total mystery to you.

I went to the other place and got the top first in a humanity. I did very little work even in my final year.

What I would say though is that everyone who gets in to O&C is bright and most are amongst the brightest in their year at school. The problem is that a 3Astar pupil is pretty normal at O&C and that is a huge culture shock for many. There was one boy in my year & subject who was the first person in his school to ever get in and had clearly been treated as some sort of living god for managing it. But he was as average as they came when he got there and despite working his socks off only got a middling 2:1

My brother did Advanced Computer Science at Cambridge and finished with a First. I don't think he found it as intense as that post describes. But it was a different course to Maths and my brother is a very laid-back person who doesn't get stressed easily and is also super smart.

This is good to know! I did NatSci ~20 years ago. I went intending to do Physics, but actually Maths and Physics were the hardest subjects in my first year (I had only done one Maths A Level) and I went on to ultimately specialise in Chemistry and came out with a high 1st.

I think what you take from the experience does depend on your personality. It certainly makes you resilient. The pace is fast, and you are given difficult problem sets to do each week which require you to really understand the material you have just learnt in the lectures. We would pour over these problem sets every week, and still only manage to complete 40% of it. However, if you are willing to push yourself and relish the challenge then it is a really amazing feeling when (towards the end of the term/year) you start to master the concepts. I loved the course and it's one of the best experiences I have had in my life.

I studied a humanities subject at Cambridge but recognise some of this from the mathematicians I knew. I think it’s a subject where some people just hit a ceiling and can’t do anymore. There were some real maths prodigies who had been at A level standard at around 11 etc. A mathematician described one paper to me where you got double marks for a complete solution and marks deducted for attempting something and getting it wrong so if you took a risk and did a full answer to something difficult you could do spectacularly well but you could also crash and burn by being too ambitious in what you attempted.

Most Cambridge students go in thinking they’re quite bright and end up feeling decidedly average though.

Even in humanities I had some “impossible” exams. I had a paper where we had to translate a poem which hadn’t been translated before because some of the vocabulary only occurred in that one poem plus some of the poem had been lost so there were gaps. That’s the sort of “trick” which Cambridge like. It is a way of separating the bright and well prepared from the exceptional though. I also had a paper where we were given some commentary in German to respond to despite German not being part of the course (just assumed you should be able to read in German).

I supervised some of the NatSci first years in my college who were going on to do physics and found they were not enjoying the maths courses at all. I did manage to get them back on track, at least well enough to get decent marks in the exams. It sounded like the lectures were the issue, assuming knowledge that many of them didn't have from A level.

There is huge variation in what students have learned before they arrive. I met some mathmos at Trinity who would have got a solid mark in their first year exams before we'd been to a single lecture.

Whoever it was who struggled with first year physics at Cam.
They had to completely rewrite the first year physics course about 10-15 years ago as it was just too hard for school leavers.
In the 90s I had 4 school friends who were top of the class for a level physics. They all went on to do NatSci and pretty much crashed and burned, came out with 2:2s. Weren't allowed to change course as their grades weren't good enough, paradoxically....