When parents are slagging off the local comp...

As user says, the grades are the minimum entry requirement. Everyone applying will have top grades or be predicted top grades at A level or pre-U. There are reasons why students from Westminster might be more independent thinkers than those at QE Boys but I suspect you will dismiss them. They would be to do with both the style of teaching, the courses taken (many Pre-U at Westminster) and the demographic, including parental influence on pupil choices.

Come on: you are again being disingenuous.

Oxbridge and other highly selective courses require high grades, and select from those who have high grades. They won't necessarily offer to those who have the highest A level grades but all those who get offers are likely to have very strong grades. Strong grades are necessary but not sufficient to get an offer.

Many RG courses select only on grades and offer to all those who have the required grades. Strong grades are necessary and sufficient to get an offer.

The two cases are not the same, as has been said over and over on this thread. It is you who is focusing on the first case, while quoting studies which (by sheer numbers) are dominated by the second case.

I have to say, the universities themselves really emphasise good A level results & generally good academic results:

www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/applying/what-are-we-looking-for

"Academic ability and potential

We're looking for students with the academic ability and potential to flourish at the University. Therefore, you should be aiming for excellent examination grades. Typical A Level/IB offers and subject requirements are outlined on each course page. Entry requirements as well as typical offers for a range of other examination systems/qualifications can be found in the applying section"

They then go on to say they want independent thinkers & people who love their courses. All very well and good, but I don't see how going to Westminster rather than QE boys means you will be better at either.

Finally, User 615 said this:

"I'm very interested in widening participation (to the extent that I spend a lot of time doing it). It doesn't help to give out misleading information, though. Very few contextual offers are significantly below standard offers (i.e more than one grade down) at high tariff universities. Very few contextual offers are made on the basis of the student being "rounded", unless roundedness is actually relevant to the course. Many RG universities are unwilling to drop offers at all in subjects where lower entrance grades are strongly correlated with higher failure and drop out rates (maths, computer science etc). "

Which indicated to me that grades were the most important thing.

If they're not, then Oxford/Cambridge should make this clearer, as this knowledge may only reside in schools with a lot of Oxbridge experience, everyone else has to rely on the website.

I apologise - phrased the post above badly - I do not mean to say that even if you do not pay for school you can get good exam results - quite the opposite - do not pay for schools because you think you might get better exam results. I hope I have somewhat made myself clear.

Ah got it - NCLS and SHHS the way to go

Ds has a decent fistful of GCSE A*s - nowhere near as well as others will have done from other schools , many of which will not have been fee paying , - but also did well on the aptitude test (humanities) . He has an aptitude for a subject and that one only. I believe that is why he got a place. The school could not have altered that decision either way IMHO .

I meant different in their academic potential.

I would hope that even Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard or Yale students can be different....

Goodbyestranger no but some schools and pupils do. That is one of the reasons why students can be so different despite having a similar string of A* grades.

sendsummer if you believe that that's how straight A* are/ were achieved I guess, but I'm not sure that it is/was. At least I don't recall my DC approaching their GCSEs that way.

Absolutely agree user721 with both your posts. Perfectionism and excellent exam technique are laudable but should not be the main focus of education or criteria of future potential. Time spent on chasing those perfect marks by repetitive practising of exam technique could IMO be more usefully spent on other aspects of education.

Or the other way around. You could lose a lot of brilliant linguists and historians by filtering on maths and physics GCSE....

From the other camp, I would say that Oxford's insistence on GCSE results and pretests also put lots of people off. Cambridge certainly picked up some people who didn't want to go through the hurdle of pretests.

I don't believe that a full set of A stars at GCSE had much relevance for e.g. potential in science subjects. One could lose a lot of star scientists by filtering on GCSE grades in MFL and humanities. I do think 9s in maths will be essential for maths related subjects, although almost all candidates will have them anyhow. Not so sure that 9s in other subjects are going to be well correlated with high academic potential further down the line.

Oxford has always rated complete sets of A* at GCSE user615, and Cambridge always tends to follow Oxford's direction, eventually.

More generally, I don't know to what extent 9s at GCSE will actually correlate with very high academic potential for university level study.

Yes quite user615 so why Cambridge banged on about UMS at AS goodness only knows. They may well have lost a good number of very talented students that way, or at least deterred lots of state school applicants. Anyhow, irrelevant now I suppose.

Phew just came back to the thread. bit of corroborating evidence.

(I am terrible on a mobile, sorry.)

But Cambridge in any case interview a very large fraction of applicants, much more than Oxford do, so UMS filtered out relatively few applicants.

If schools like Westminster really are teaching beyond the A, lots of 9s compared to grammars would be one albeit incomplete not of coraberating evidence.*

When we say they are teaching beyond the curriculum, we mean that they are teaching beyond the curriculum i.e. not aiming for perfect scores on tests but teaching wider and broader material. I do think that it will be interesting to see the 1-9 grades - although many private schools avoid exams under government influence and are still doing iGCSEs until the dust settles - but these grades are not really going to be corroborating evidence for Oxbridge potential, as they are not directly correlated with what Oxbridge is looking for.

The advent of 1-9 replacing letter grades should be interesting in this debate. If schools like Westminster really are teaching beyond the A*, lots of 9s compared to grammars would be one albeit incomplete not of coraberating evidence.

Well to be fair to Alyosha Cambridge has been pretty fixated on average AS marks into the 90s until this latest round, just as the first sift. In the same way Oxford has always needed people to be predicted at least the minimum (relatively low) A level grades to be put into the interview pot. But as I say, it's the starting point and I don't recall any Oxbridge admissions tutor anywhere ever saying anything different.

The admissions people on this thread, for starters?

We have said the opposite. Presumably you are just trying to have an argument.

Oxford & Cambridge who say no.1 most important thing is A level & module grades?

Where has this been stated?

Thanks for the link. Higher acceptances again for NLCS in 2015, will look at the 3 year average :D

Oxford & Cambridge who say no.1 most important thing is A level & module grades?

No I think the message put out is that meeting the minimum standard A level grades is the starting point, not the end point. Not that that has to do with why grammars lag behind equivalent independents in terms of Oxbridge entry.

The admissions people on this thread, for starters?