GCSE exams

The wider sweep of exam results accepted by uni(s) maybe reflective of the increased access to higher education, going from just 10% of school leavers in the 1970s to 33% in 2012. With more places to fill and the need to attract revenue from student fees there will always be the temptation to review entrance requirements. Certainly media reports of last year`s Clearing suggested even top uni(s) were lowering their offers.
Maybe 10 As would guarantee your first choice but the lack of As may not in the end prove to be a deterrent to a place at a Russell group establishment.

Also, it's maybe a little disingenuous to say a lousy grade in a seriously soft and non related subject won't hold you back. But a C grade in a mainstream core subject may actually not be so great.

No not Bristol friendface, but not dissimilar. I'd like to think that access issues weren't merely paid lip service to and I'm sure in some quarters they're not, but I think elsewhere that's about all it is - ticking boxes and paying lip service. I don't get the impression that this particular department has changed its policy in real terms at all.

Was that Bristol Molio? If so that is the exact treason DS didn't apply there. He got fewer A* than that yet I'm sure would have received an offer (got offers from UCL and durham) but didn't want to waste a choice on one he thought he would be rejected by. Who knows how many other students were put off in a similar way?

Sorry for bringing the Oxbridge debate into this - I suppose my point was that you can't start second guessing what admissions tutors want. No one should be put off applying to a university because they don't think their gcse results were good enough if they have improved since taking them. Also, at no point did creamteas or anyone suggest people shouldn't try because they could get in with 5 Cs! Without extenuatig circumstances I would be suprised if many admissions tutors had received applications from students with 5 Cs at gcse but 4 As or whatever at AS level so really this argument is irrelevant.

All I want to point out is that it really does not matter if you are not A* material for every subject at gcse. A C in needlework isn't going to hold you back in life.

Yes. One redbrick university department (not medicine) until a few years ago said on its webpage that successful applicants typically had a minimum of 7A* at GCSE, often more. It's since revised the webpage because clearly it didn't look great in terms of encouraging access. That doesn't mean the policy has changed, merely the public statement.

I also think there is a gap (and often a wide one) between the grades required by a univeristy as a minimum and the grades that are likely to secure you a place.

Just because a university will, in theory, make an offer to a student with 5 Cs, doesn't mean any offers go out to students with those grades.

It depends on the competition.

Any applicant seeking a place on a competitive course, will need grades as good as, if not better than their competitors (excluding contextual issues etc)...

froofroo this isn't about Oxford versus Cambridge, it's about whether students should bother with GCSEs because a couple of posters say they're irrelevant for the purposes of clinching a university offer. I merely offered up Oxford/ medicine as a course where As at GCSE are literally fed into a computer and crunched up with the aptitude test to determine who gets an interview. No interview, no place, as you say. It's one example of where A grades are a clear determinant.

www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/teachers/presentations/teachersforum2010.pdf

There is a graph here which charts the final degree results of students from both independent and maintained school backgrounds. It shows no real difference between the sectors.

www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/teachers/docs/student_conference_teacher_forum_presentation.pdf

This presentation contains graphs which chart the number of A* at GCSE and the UMS gained by successful candidates at Cambridge in various subjects.

Both, I think people can get a little over-hyped about the UMS and GCSE argument. Ultimately at Oxford & Cambridge the tutor is going to pick the person in front of them at interview. The rest gets you there and might tip you one way or the other, but given how easy it is to game AS & A levels these days, the tutors have to to judge somehow (everyone has great grades, and helped save the ponies, and did work experience with X local MP/ lawyer /Doctor) so they will see how academically robust the student is in a sadly very short period of time or through their own admissions tests.

friendface it's pretty well known that Cambridge looks at ASs and Oxford at GCSEs so anyone can take a side if they wish. I think I said earlier that those who get only 5 GCSEs at grade C aren't overwhelmingly likely to get 93% on their best three ASs and that exceptional circumstances apart, there tends to be a fairly coherent trajectory. My point is not that GCSEs are the be all and end all but that for one admissions tutor to say his or her uni doesn't rate them doesn't mean they aren't rated elsewhere, by possibly more competitive unis. Lots of students are sufficiently well informed and canny enough to work out where their best chance lies: are their GCSEs better than their ASs? Is it the other way round? Do they think they'd do well in an aptitude test? Would they be safer with an almost guaranteed interview? Bottom line for me would be: don't diss GCSEs. You don't know how things might turn out later.

The other thing I would say Molio is that there is a lot of disagreement over whether or not GCSEs are actually a good indicator. You quote Oxford as having a narrow range, but Cambridge disregard GCSEs in favour of having 90%+ at AS level. Obviously if you're capable of getting such AS level results you're likely to have done well at GCSE so it is hard to 'prove' they don't take GCSEs into consideration to the extent Oxford do, but it is worth considering a split of opinions over the use of GCSEs particularly given the view that boys (in general!) underachieve at GCSE.

You're not completely accurately re-typing what I and a few other posters have said creamteas. For my part I said some courses at some unis have a very narrow range, somewhere between 8 and 12 A. Not 8 and 12 As, that's very different. For example if you go to the Oxford Pre-Clinical page on the university website you'll see data provided for those offered places for entry in 2014. It shows precisely what range of GCSE grades offerees have. The info isn't privileged. Birmingham med school likewise has a very narrow range of As. You'll find certain Oxford colleges with a similarly narrow range across all subjects, even despite their extra tools (aptitude tests and interviews) used for admissions. The list could go on.

I get what you say about plenty of unis not being this strict, and agree that plenty of kids don't get straight A*/A, but the fact remains that GCSEs are used as a tool in admissions at a lot of unis and to dismiss them as not mattering is somewhat naïve. The bottom line is that there's no point in generalising about uni admissions, because it's complex and varied, as it should be and as one would expect.

As I have already stated, I am not claiming that lots of people with 5Cs at GCSE go to top unis, I am trying to show that the claims made above that top universities only want people with over 8 As are not true.

Clearly people applying for Chemistry are likely have an A at GCSE in Chemistry. After all, if they found it difficult they probably wouldn't be taking it for A level.

But they don't necessarily need 8 As to be considered and a C in history or RE is very unlikely to be a major barrier to applying for Chemistry or Maths.

Whilst I 'know' on MN almost every child gets a sweep of As and A* at GCSE, and a B is seen as an unmitigated failure, but this is really not representative of GCSE results nationally.

Most year 11 pupils come out with a range of grades and a few Cs at GCSE is not likely to be a barrier to even top unis unless they are in the area chosen for the degree.

Similarly for imperial how many applicants will have B grade chemistry? Again the vast majority will have A or A (particularly as an A+ at A level Chem, which is what Imperial wants, is hard for even those with A at gcse).

But really cream teas in reality how many UCL students do you think have only 5 gcses at grade C? The vast majority of applicants will have at least 8 with predominantly a and a* grades.

If you look at specific courses at specific unis you'll find that there is absolutely no 'range', or at least a very narrow one (somewhere between 8 and 12 A)

Actually the vast majority of university websites only mention one of two GCSEs that they want specific grades in and rarely ask for A*s.

For example for biochemisty Imperial only say they want Grade B in Maths, English, Chemistry, Biology (or Combined Sciences) and UCL ask for English Language and Mathematics at grade C.

I'm not intending that creamteas should get a rough deal, but when a poster says s/he is an admissions tutor and therefore knows stuff other people don't, but is incorrect in what s/he says, then s/he's going to get challenged (by me anyway :)). Because otherwise people reading get duff info. If you look at specific courses at specific unis you'll find that there is absolutely no 'range', or at least a very narrow one (somewhere between 8 and 12 A*). The fact that a PPEist at the LSE got a poor grade in D&T at GCSE might not scupper his application, but an across the board middling performance would.

I agree completely Molio. IMO the re-sitting was just getting out of hand - I know students who were made to sit exams they had got an A* in again in order to get 100%! Meanwhile DS just got one shot with 25 exams in one go. With a move towards the linear system, this type of discrepancy will be removed. To a degree I agree that fewer exams would be better, but in all honesty I think DS coped better with the shorter exams than the longer one. He recently sat a two and a half hour long A2 which he really struggled to keep concentratin though.

I think creamteas is getting a rough deal here! I completely agree with her that at many institutions (top and bottom!) you will get in with a range of GCSEs. Especially when looking back a few years ago when students were made to sit 12/13 subjects with such little specialisation it's not unreasonable to expect students not to be good at everything. So for someone applying to read economics at the LSE it should be irrelevant whether or not they got an A in GCSE biology - students are human after all!

Cross post. Quite. There's no need to pretend equivalence, except for political reasons and the distinct nervousness in recognising through the education system that different kids are good at different stuff.

The clumsy knee jerk reaction to grade inflation came with the marking in summer 2012. These are not knee jerk reforms - they've been a long while coming. The system where some schools took exams covering small parts of a syllabus and then had the chance to re-take again and again was not properly testing and having two different systems running at the same time while purporting to give the same end qualification was just nonsense. At my DCs' school the tests have always been taken all in one go at the end of the two year syllabus. They each take 11 or 12 subjects and there have always been around 24 exams. This is not new. It's only new to those used to the modular system. Over those years of course there will always have been a small proportion who get stressed, but the stress is to do with the child itself, or parental pressure, it's not caused by the nature or number of different exams. It's also worth saying that only a couple of exams are as much as 2 hours long, most are shorter.

As far as uni goes, then obviously if your experience is of a creamteas type uni or course (for want of a better description) then you might well think that GCSEs don't matter. But at a lot of the most competitive unis they do, there's no escaping the fact.

I completely agree that different children, need different types of education and different types of assessment.

I'm sure most people would agree.

However, where the problems have arisen is in the assertion that they have equivalence.

Society needs lots of people contributing with lots of different skills. So educating all kids in the same way to the same level regardless of individual talent makes absolutely no sense.