Winchester College - Best School

It is true, not only for Wincol but for Eton. A friends of mine ds choose to become Exhibition even if offered for Election. He had witnessed some of his classmates broke down due to pressure in his prep who eventually went to the Wincol college house (2011 entry) & didn't see much benefit being in such environment. He couldn't be happy in normal house after all.

True I forgot about them and I've heard some refuse the scholarship and take an exhibition so they dont live in College I dont know how true that is.

Stupid spell corrector!

I think what colleger is trying to say is that there are not 25 places up for grabs in College but 14.

Angel cakes your facts are wrong because there are it 25 places up for grabs in College but 14 at Eton and Winchester.

Angelcakes, how are you preparing him for Election exactly and when did you start ? Is tutoring a year ahead a must in your view? How much is his school helping him?

1. Via prep school
2. 40-60 I believe
3. Yes
4. I doubt anyone could answer this as each child will offer a different number of subjects. The content may differ but I think the number of subjects available is the same as Eton.

Winchester College Election - What I would like to know:

1. How are boys selected to sit the Election.

2. The average number of boys sitting each year.

3. Do boys come from abroad to compete.

4. Beside the compulsory 4 + 3 subjects, the average total number of subjects offered by boys.

greythorne, sorry that my comments obviously rubbed you the wrong way. I have no desire to get into a verbal sprawl here. The purpose was to dispel the myths about burden of preparation for the exams and the excessive knowledge intensiveness, which is the very opposite of your suggestion.

However, risking that a bit, if you think the conservation of momentum and energy to e=mc2 suggestion was overegging, then there is not much more I can add except that parts of it can be done by a primary school kid from experience. I can understand that for a linguist and literature expert, it can sound all too fantastic. That is the elegance of relativity compared with quantum physics or much closer to familiar reality, with ac electricity for example. Similarly, with a little hand-holding, a primary school kid can estimate the mass of iron in the sun without much knowledge.

As for the "average punter", that is just the point; do the thinking and logic portion for him/her, if he can add and multiply, he could accomplish the same. Election science and maths papers are lighter on the latter and heavier on the former.

Schools focus far too much on knowledge and exams and too little on thinking and questioning. I guess it is difficult to measure the latter in a league table driven world.

Yes, most teachers (I hope) can also set similar questions but the point is most also don't. A fair population of kids would eagerly join in to tackle these sorts of problems given a chance.

I will not add any more to this thread to keep everyone happy.

I think dwynwen is right many schools like Westminster Charterhouse and Eton offer the Pre U but as she says either only in certain subjects or to the more able.
Win Coll is the only one to offer it "wholesale". My children are not old enough for me to know much about A levels IBAC or Pre U or which one is harder/easier more widely accepted by universities although I do now know thanks to a posting on MN that the individual grades at Pre U are worth more UCAS points than their A level equivilant. But I don't know enough about 6 th form ed to know if this makes a significant difference.
Perhaps some one who has access to The Times article could paraphrase it on a new and more interesting thread.

Pre-U is an alternative to A level in some traditional, well known schools who have not chosen the IB alternative. Usually, the choice is left to individual departments - where the Pre-U syllabus is preferred to A Level it is chosen but where the department prefers A level it is kept. I'm not sure that any have moved wholesale (though Winchester sounds as if it pretty much has, according to HG). That might change if experience shows these schools that their choice suits their pupils.

DH definitely does Pre-U so does Charterhouse.

'Although you may be interested to know that Win Coll is I believe the only school in the UK to only offer the much harder Pre U! '

Nope, Downe House does it, and has done for a couple of years. I know as my friend is a house mistress there. Westminster does it too.

gbxpat
i really think you are overegging the pudding.

The maths and science on the Win Coll election papers may exceed the knowledge of your average punter on the Clapham Omnibus.

But I hazard that most teachers of science and maths at GCSE and A level would revel in writing such questions.

You are oly showing your own lack of interest and knowledge of the field by mythologising these papers in this way.

I know a lot about English, French and American literature. I guarantee I can write (and answer) some fabulously stretching exam questions to weed out the tutored and the shallow and to allow the deep thinkers and oddballs to shine.

Win Coll is just a boys' school. Not Xanadu. Let's try not to forget that.

You are all being rather mean IMO.....

We wouldn't go down the public school route at all (that's another thread entirely) but you are being very pedantic!

We are all entitled to our views!

I had no intention of suggesting lesser intellectual brilliance among us here than the WC dons - sorry. I honestly believe that there is only a minority of people who can set these questions. They are not like the Oxford /Cambridge "off-the-wall" types. They are also not trick questions designed to trip over anyone either.

Ok, the essay type papers are perhaps not so demanding to set, but the science and maths papers are. To be honest, there are topics there I know neither I nor my colleagues and friends had even wondered about. These questions almost always have a practical side dealing with real-life problems. I have yet to see an esoteric one; they were everywhere in the old Oxbrige entrance papers.

At the risk of getting further off-topic, the best way I could describe them is this:

It is fair to say that even the most amazing scientific discoveries and theories have some fairly basic elements that a 10 year-old could handle. Those who set these science and maths questions handled all the parts that are beyond a 12-13 year-old's knowledge, left out gaps of easy parts but those requiring some elegant insight as exam questions.

I would not put it beyond them to have a question some day on conservation of momentum and energy (and perhaps through in angular momentum with plenty of hand-holding for a digression), and then move on to leading the candidate to prove e=mc2. (Or have they already done that?) Trying to emulate that very quickly generated new respect for them. At a minimum, they must have had a lot of fun coming up with them.

Election and indeed WC itself is not for everyone regardless of intelligence and I think it would be very unfair to other schools to label it the best. It is very good for those who thrive in that setting, but they may also thrive in some IB schools which offer very different approach.

Getting back on topic, having these dons around must create a fairly stimulating setting. Learning can be boring at times, but discovering/exploring is never that.

The most impressive achievement I note is that WC boys are rarely arrogant but they are self-assured and often self-sufficient; they also have the capacity to find interesting things to talk about in conversations with a great diversity of people.

Gramercy you may well be right! The comment from the headmaster at Wellington was made last week to the headmaster at a choir school. I asked that headmaster whether the choristers' academic work suffered and whether the huge choral commitment was taken into account when applying to senior schools.

I think "bringing something to school life" might include a big fat cheque!

It's a bit off the topic of the thread, but what is the point of IGCSE's and the PreU? DD does a couple of IGCSE's and all it seems to do is make the school look bad as they aren't included in the league tables! Surely children doing these so called 'harder' exams are not at any advantage due to the fact that the exams are not universally offered? So who gains from doing them?
Agree with the comment about the exam results being a reflection of the school's intake, would they still get the same results if they weren't selective? Also, as I said before, what do girls do if they want to go to the 'best' school? Obviously they can't go to Win Coll...

I think you are spot on gramercy. I posted on the Wellington thread that the headmaster at Wellington is willing to consider candidates with low CE scores if they are bringing something to school life - eg excelling in sports or music. I can't believe every pupil at Winchester is super bright.

Are they not, gramercy? I though all independent schools were three quarters filled with the children of shelf stackers and hairdressers on full bursaries.

Let us not forget that Winchester, just as other fee-paying schools, need fee payers!

From reading MN one could get the idea that scholarships and bursaries are flung out like confetti and only a few mugs end up paying. If Winchester only accepted those pupils of the utmost brilliance they'd have quite a few empty seats (or beds, in their case). Recently there has been a significant rise at Winchester (and no doubt at other public schools too) in the number of foreign boys - particularly Chinese. I'm sure these boys are very clever, but I doubt whether they are acing all aspects of the entrance exam.

Not to engage with the objectively 'good' or not bit, but just on Election/whys & wherefores - my ds is doing it, not because we expect him to get a scholarship but (as in fact is the case with most of the Election candidates, most of whom won't get a scholarship but nearly all of which will be accepted as ordinary pupils) the idea is that the style of exam will suit his peculiar autodidact mind better than more conventional ones do.

They are looking for a certain type - who engages with things for their own academic sake, not because they're being taught it - those types (like ds) are often a bit of a problem in more conventional schools, the sort who sit at the back of the class immersed in the textbook and utterly disengaged from the lesson. Indeed WC is the only school that want him - and Election was their suggestion, not our idea. Ds immerses himself in maths, science, IT, commerce - goes through New Scientist, Week, Economist, Wired, every issue, because he wants to; but doing an ordinary RS (eg) essay, even when he knows everything he's meant to put, is torture. He's only interested in what he's interested in, and he's intensely interested in that. He spent a train trip recently covering pages with diagrams of every organic molecule he could think of.

If WC find what they want at Election, there are significant scholarships available, which means that those boys come from all sorts of backgrounds - not the elitist stereotype people often think of for public school.

For info, here is an example of a further maths past question (which for ds is his idea of fun, and which I couldn't start to do):

"The energy released by an earthquake used to be measured by the Richter Scale. For every increase of one on the scale the earthquake is ten times more powerful, e.g., 4 on the scale is 100 times more powerful than 2 on the scale.

How much more powerful is a 6.3 earthquake than a 2.3 earthquake?

One earthquake measures 2 on the Richter Scale. A second one is ten thousand times more powerful.

What does it measure on the scale?

Earthquake P measures 4 on the Richter scale. Earthquake Q measures 4.5 and earthquake R measures 5. Q is x times more powerful than P.

Earthquake R is how much more powerful than Q?
Circle which answer is correct:
5 x 10 10/9

Earthquake R is how much more powerful than P?

What is the value of x?"