Are State School Oxbridge Students More Intelligent?

[sarahlayton06]

Are students who attended state comprehensive schools (especially poor-performing ones) and yet managed to get all 9s in their GCSEs and all A*s at A-level and get into Oxbridge inherently more intelligent than students who got similar grades and got into Oxbridge and other prestigious universities but went to private school or to a selective grammar school?

This is as without the privilege of better education, they may not have performed as well?

I think this post is spot on. Is it Cambridge that are now changing or re-looking at their contextual criteria? They've found that state pupils gaining places are from very similar backgrounds to their privately educated peers. Year after year, the pupils we know gaining Oxbridge places were not necessarily those with the very top academic grades. Overwhelmingly they had one or more parent who had been to Oxbridge themselves or they were teachers or they had siblings at Oxbridge or they're from a generally middle class or comfortable background.

If you are a regular reader of the Oxbridge board on here, you can see this playing out. The real outliers are those who don't have this background but still get in. I think they try to attract more state school pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds but this needs sharper focus.

I agree they shouldn't be disrupting classrooms but you can't just chuck them out with no plan to help them find a way to do better in life?

Oh yes most definitely OP 😌

I mean if it’s not true then I guess we’re saying from an education pov there’s no advantage to a private education. That if your kid is intelligent enough to get an A , they’d get that whether they were at a state school or a private school. Though I suspect the reason the majority of private school kids are sent to private schools is that their parents know they will get a better education and are therefore more likely to do well in exams.

though I’m sure some would bluster and swear blind that’s not true and it’s all to do with extra curricular activities or some such rubbish 😁

Inclusion

I don’t think it is that straightforward. Those with twelve 9s at GCSE and four A-levels at A* at independent schools will also typically be heavily involved in extra and supra curricular activities - grade 8 distinctions/ diplomas in music, NYT/ grade 8 LAMDA, county/ national sports teams, maths and science Olympiad training etc (quite often a combination of all of those). It will not just be about academics there and it takes a lot of effort, discipline and intelligence to keep that many balls in the air.

@yodaforpresident - state school kids do all of that too!

Exactly. A relative of mine is in a state school and just come in the top ten for British maths olympian. Private schools don’t have a monopoly on kids doing those sort of things. He’s also very good at the violin, not sure what grade. 🤷‍♀️

not even in a grammar school, just the local comp.

I never said that they didn’t….

The children who get to Oxbridge are the successful ones, whether state or private. The are all intelligent. The difference between state and private is there are a lot more unsuccessful ones in state - intelligent children who fell by the wayside due to poor schools, and community or home circumstances. If those children had attended private school they may have had a chance of attending Oxbridge.

If you just consider those already at Oxbridge, you ignore the bright children failed by state schools or circumstance. They would never have been considered by Oxbridge though because their failure is much earlier in the process and they would never apply as they may only have mediocre GCSEs. They may be the disruptive kids in class.

My ds has applied and interviewed for Oxford. We find out in January if he gets a place.

He attends a state college that performs well below average and almost never sends anyone to Oxbridge. They post their highest results in the local paper on results day: last year one girl got an A-star in geography and that was the only A star in college.

I don't know if state educated Oxbridge dc are more intelligent than private, but my ds certainly has needed much more self discipline, self motivation, and resilience than a dc who is catered for at private school.

As an example, ds takes further maths but at the end of year 12 his teacher told him that in year 13 the college wouldn't have the staff to teach the usual three lessons a week. Ds only gets two lessons a week in further maths and self teaches the additional work.

To make this possible, ds spent the 6 week summer holidays before year 13 teaching himself all of year 13 maths so that this year he could focus more time on the further maths.

There were no Oxbridge practice interviews at college, no personal statement help. Ds only has two friends at college that are going on to university. The others were kicked off their a level course after year 12, doing apprenticeships, etc.

So I do think it takes different skills and character for ds. He walks a fine line socially between being ambitious but not obnoxious and alienating his friends who won't come near his grades.

Oh god don’t ask this question there was a painful thread a few weeks ago with lots of long words and pontificating basically ranting about the injustice against privately educated Oxbridge candidates no longer having preferences. I lost the will to live reading it

It possibly means it was harder for them to obtain (as pp said if college doesn't do subject) but the main benefit of private school is smaller class sizes. Ultimately this means the student gain confidence and ask anything they don't understand directly, which may help the whole class and boost their performance.

So you can't say private kids are less clever, indeed they may know more as class discussions might be clearer and more student led into avenues off syllabus, but you can possibly say state kids had to work harder in the respect of bigger/noisier classes and possibly finding a venue to take a class that would be within the private schooling. If they all get A's or A* arguably they have the same level of intelligence. It's the ones who have developed critical thinking skills and communication that get in.

Admittedly I was there in the 90’s but my take on it is that you can’t generalise- there were some stupendously bright people there from all sorts of schools and then a huge number of people like me who were pretty academic but honestly not massive intellects and then a few people where you were about like “um how did you get in?” The stand out most intelligent person in my year had been to a comprehensive ( is now quite a famous philosopher) but then the one in the year above went to Winchester.

Also whilst disruption in some state schools is an issue for GCSEs it’s much less so for A Levels because the students are electing to be there. I think the benefit of a private school is probably mainly expectations and peer group ( most privately educated people at Oxbridge went to a school that was fairly selective so their A level class would have been full of people all working at A*/ A grade standard. I went to a state 6th form and the average grade in all my classes was a C. That said, there are loads of “comprehensives” now that have pretty tough entry requirements for A levels ( my friends son needs 7s) so that’s possibly becoming less of an issue.

I think pp is correct that school is only one aspect. Family background and geography are also important.

12% are privately educated.

You seem very preoccupied with Oxbridge. Schools, private and state, sixth form and further education colleges all differ in their approach and development of self study skills, and even vary across different subjects and courses. Relying purely on what is taught directly won't achieve best grades wherever and won't impress at interview,

Yes I think so. They've had to work harder esp in bigger class sizes.

Do we want to live in a society where we just abandon a proportion of the population? GCSEs - even if only a few - are pretty fundamental to getting employment.

No.

They might be of similar intelligence but have additional attributes such as ambition, resilience, worldliness, etc. than kids who were afforded every opportunity to excel.

I think much of it depends on family support too. Just because a kid went to state school, doesn't mean they're on the bones of their arse and have no one in their corner.

It doesn’t change innate intelligence but certainly in terms of resilience; drive; work ethic etc. it is an easy route for private pupils. However, going to Oxbridge isn’t everything and they don’t always get it right when they pick their students (someone was on the Oxbridge thread here who worked in admissions and said they get it wrong sometimes).

Not necessarily and there are too many variables to get a definitive answer.

My kid got really high GCSE results (8 x 9s and 1 x 8) at a comp with good progress 8 but with big classes and many, many times a teacher was absent and they were handed a worksheet to do. She got 100% in one particular GCSE and that was because she did a lot of additional study at home which wasn't covered in lessons. She is very focused, quietly competitive, always busy with school work or extra curriculum. She's predicted 3 x A stars at A Level and just had an interview for Oxbridge.

But she's also got very supportive parents with degrees (one of which was from Oxbridge), hundreds of books in the house, enough money to help with whatever she needs etc.

I went to a private school that got a lot of people into Oxbridge / Russell group and we were primed for it from day 1 - small class sizes, continuous testing, many opportunities for public speaking, many trips abroad, unbelievable sports facilities etc. Kids there were pushed hard and given every opportunity to do well. I can remember a handful of times a teacher was absent and they were immediately replaced by a teacher from the same department. Nobody was sat around doing worksheets.

What I'm saying is the kids who are in state may not be more intelligent than their private school counterparts but they have to go the extra mile to get to Oxbridge. And the ones who are coming from homes with little support, well I'm not quite sure how they're doing it but I have so much more respect for them. My kid definitely hasn't had what many of my contemporaries had in terms of schooling but, at the same time, she's had a lot of support at home.

In a study about 15 years ago there was no statistical difference in degree outcomes between state comp and private https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/argpschoolperformance.pdf. This report from 2016 shows that state comp students did a little worse than private school students https://www.information-hub.admin.cam.ac.uk/files/examinationresults_statistics2016.pdf.__

From what I remember when I was there there was some evidence that state school pupils did a bit better in their degrees in maths and science than private school pupils but not arts or other subjects. Admissions knows that for 2 exactly matched candidate the state school pupil will probably do better and choose accordingly. The fact that there is now no difference on average in outcomes (though there might be in certain subjects) I think means that admissions has got it about right now on admitting on merit. Over 70% of Cambridge’s intake comes from state schools now.

All kinds of reasons. Firstly because education should be a right, not a privilege, and some of the worst-behaved kids are like they are for a reason. It's beneficial to the whole of society to at least try to counteract the effects of their terrible upbringing so they can function in society. You can't just give up on them at age 12 or 14 and chuck them out on the streets.

More practically speaking, schools aren't allowed to just exclude kids willy-nilly. They have to jump through a lot of hoops to permanently exclude a child, and even then, they often get back in on appeal. Even if the school succeeds in excluding them, where do they go? To another school, where they will usually cause the same problems.

I think the Oxbridge system is designed only to take state students who ‘fit in’. Oxbridge is a scam. The students aren’t better or worse than the other top universities.