to want to have a very heated discussion with my sons head of year

[alypaly]

My son has passed 9 GCSE's with 4 A* and 5 A's and his head of year has just told him that he should look at universities with lower acceptance results for medicine.
What the hell......he couldnt have done much better. he has come home so confused,angry and disillusioned. It has really knocked his conidence for six. He doesnt want to got to Oxford ,Cambridge or UCL so those werent even in the equation anyway.

I am so glad he didnt say this to him and his friends who have similar results, before their AS levels otherwise i would have bopped him on the nose(well not really)

Manchester also AAA, as is Peninsula, but Liverpool, Keele and Glasgow do accept a single B, so apologies for those.

But definitely not "B's and C's", which is where my incorrect info thing really came from. Peninsula's also in the top 10 in the country, so someone is really not paying attention to detail here, be it you, your son or his teacher.

It doesn't bode well for an incredibly intense and competitive application and interview process.

Your son has several choices he can put down, right? So why not put an ambitious one and a safe bet? He can always re-apply if he isn't happy - it is actually very easy to get back to medicine later on if that is really what he wants.

Some people work steadily through their lives, scoring the same sort of results at every stage. Others come on in leaps and bounds, sometimes struggling and sometimes doing far better than expected. Only you and your son can really know which he is, but if you even suspect he's going to do better than predicted, then he should go for the place he wants to study at, and he should ignore the teacher. The teacher has a vested interest in getting students into universities - he doesn't necessarily have an interest in supporting ambitious admissions by people who are actually very good.

Btw, I have constantly been told to set my sights lower and to give up, but I am stubborn and it all worked out ok. As long as he's clued up about the risk he's taking in applying to difficult places for a difficult degree, it's fine. Much better to try and perhaps fail, than not to try at all.

forget Newcastle University have a very good Medicine dept

Don't foeget tut.

God, I give up. Tiredness impedes my typing technique. I'm off to bed.

Which also requires three A grades.

can i just say that as someone currently studying medicine at a 'top' university, a lot of what people are saying is rubbish!

when you apply for medicine they look for a/ top a-level grades (a must) and b/ excelling in extracurricular activities and c/ understanding of the rigours and demands of the future career, and a compatible personality.

GCSEs are secondary to a great extent (though most people obviously do well in them as well)

I got into 2 top universities for medicine with 'mediocre' GCSEs almost identical to those in the OP. Some people have better than me, quite a few have worse.

Don't be disheartened by this, and if your son wants to apply to top universities then he should go for it. He should make sure that he has a strong extracurricular and work experience background.

also incidentally, i got offers of AABC and AABE for medicine, but times have changed (we didn't have A*s then)

To be honest the teacher is telling it how it is you would think getting 4 A and 5 A's would be enough the problem is that everyone applying for medicine would be getting the same and the very top universities would most likely only look at people with all A and then they interview as well.

But it is important to remember these are only GCSE's it's mainly A levels and extra stuff that counts

Sammy, I know a couple of very nice teenagers who've started medicine degrees without all A* grades. Don't know how common this is of course, but it is possible. And my best mate is doing a medicine degree on the accelerated course after his first degree, and it is working very well. You don't have to follow the traditional route - and there's no harm being ambitious.

To be honest, if everyone had the attitude displayed on this thread - that the teacher is just being realistic and the student should lower expectations - I would never have learned to read and certainly never have gone to university. It can be crushing when people do you down.

I think if the OP's son wants to give this a go, he should do it and the teacher should support him.

at the end of the day it probably won't much matter which uni he goes to - just the fact that he has a medical degree will see him OK.

I remember wanting to do law but deciding that if I could not do it at Glasgow I was not doing it at all. So went to glasgow and did something else.

fast forward 20 years and my boss has a law degree from Dundee - which I thought was not good enough for me (ah the stupidity of youth!) and although he is younger he is well ahead in terms of career and cash. being a guy helps too I guess!

GCSEs are important, of course, but A Levels are still a million times more important. I think he should apply to a mix of unis. Also, if he's at a state school, he SHOULD apply to Oxbridge because they are keen to take state school kids who show potential, as they get so much flack for always taking private school kids with 25 A*s.

So in summary, I say a mix: one Oxbridge, one really good red brick and the rest all less good red bricks.

Update: OH is a teacher (unlike me) and says that Oxbridge is the only University that would care about the difference between As and A*s. So another perspective there (and coming from a more well informed position than my assumptions)

I think that it very risky to peg all his hopes on 3A. The grade hasn't been awarded yet and we are still very early in the life of the new A-level, where teaching and marking may not yet be fully aligned. I hope the school isn't actually predicting 3A.

I think the Head of Year is being very sensible. It is what all sixth form tutors do. They advise 1 or 2 insurance choices, which will hopefully guarantee an offer. The top choices cannot be guaranteed because of the competition for these courses. If you go for all top places, you risk getting no offers at all and then having to apply again the following year (which is actually no bad thing if you are willing to go this route).

As others have said, there are no bad medical schools, and all of them give you a degree that enables you to move onto the next step in a medical career. The difference in admissions between 'good' and 'insurance' will be the number of applicants.

All of the applicants will have straight As, so the student really has to show passion on their personal statement (work experience, as the OP's DS is doing, is essential for medicine).

I think that there may have been a misunderstanding and the H of Y may have just been getting them to face facts- and medicine courses will be way over subscribed.
It would be a good idea to have a back up plan with a lower acceptance rate. By all means aim high but have a back up.
I wouldn't have a heated discussion. Phone him up today and have a calm discussion, say that you and DS were rather alarmed and upset by his comment and ask him for the facts.

I would have thought that GCSE grades are but one element in the overall picture. Sure, almost all candidates applying for medicine will have mostly A or above at GCSE, but by no means all applicants will have exclusively As. I was involved with admissions at Oxford for a different subject, and most candidates had a mix of A and A at GCSE. Certainly GCSEs, above a certain bar, were highly unlikely to be the deciding factor in them getting a place or not.

Are you sure your son isn't misunderstanding? It's always been best policy to put some 'insurance' choices down, as well as top-flight ones, no matter how brilliant the student. But if he isn't misunderstanding, then I'd ask the head of year what he is on about (or contact one of the unis in question yourself). Some teachers often think they know 'the inside story' on how uni admissions work, based on rumour/hearsay/'my mate at X says' when actually they really don't.

I think it is standard practice to encourage them to put down at least one place with a slughtly lower offer as an insurance. Even if he has the grades there is no certainty he will get an offer from where he wants to go due to high competition. As others have said he will up against people with 10 A. They may not even interview anyone with less than 7A for example as they have to cut somewhere. It is a hard fact of life that just because you want to do something doesn't mean you can. Applying somewhere that doesn't want as high grades is the best thing to do to keep his options open. HOY may not have phrased it carefully enough but his sentiment was correct.

Firstly, well done to your DS.

Medicine like Teaching is incredibly competitive, and despite what the goverment tells us (so they can bring cheaper foreign Doctors in)courses are often over subscribed many times.

It is a fact I am afriad tha your son finds himself in a bad period for Students, it is a fact that Universities are going to Slash places across the board, my DW works at one and the cuts are eye watering, and this will be nationwide.

Also they have been told to take more Foreign students as they are allowed to be charged more!

Im my DW dept they had been told 4 courses will not be running, despite the fact they are 4x over subscribed every year!

All his tutor has done, albeit the wrong way is actually the right thing, with places at a absoulute premium why risk missing out, I think that is what he should of said, go safe, dont run a risk. Predictions are about 100,000 places are going to be cut across all universities. I hope he gets what he is hoping for.

I live near Keele. The medicing course is relatively new but it is well respected and UHNS has a brand new Clinical Education Centre

Ah yes. Teachers can be so reassuring, can't they? My form teacher told me I was going to "crash and burn" in my A level exams. I got 4 As, went to UCL, & graduated with a First. I wrote to her to tell her when I graduated.

I would look carefully at course content in choosing where to study. For example, PBL vs traditional course.

I have some involvement with med school admissions and the range of info we use to decide who gets invited to interview is massive. Someone with lower GCSE grades might be invited to interview because hey score highly on the UKCAT, they do a fabulous admissions questionnaire (which is not the same as the UCAS personal statement) or they just have a certain something that stands out about their application. Every yeasr we have hundreds of complaints from students with straight A*s who haven't made it to interview, TBH we take the high grades as read, it's all the other stuff (not just work experience-we expect that too!). It's massiveluy competitive and there will be some students that get 5 offers and many more who get none.

DS" went to see Head of year today to ask him about yesterday. He apologised about his attitude to him and is going to sit down with him. He approached it in a very adult non-confrontational way and hopefully he will now gain something from it.

Another thing...just checked on ucas website and they have their entrance qualifications differing from the prospectus..Phoned the med school to confirm admission details and BOTH are wrong. God help the students that dont phone up to find out. I am sure there will be many who have gone by the ucas grades and will not look at it again. Unfortunately that may mean a wasted choice for some ,but not for us now....thankfully.

Bruxeur ...you certainly have a way with words...fortunately i am on the ball and the uni of Nottingham thanked me for my info today and are going to correct their website so that no one else is mislead. As for the info on Peninsula...i had never heard of it until my son mentioned it last night so had not had time to research it.It has jumped up from 20th last year to 8th this year according to the Guardian

a rounded cv with lots of extra-curricular activites with relevance to chosen profession is what he needs

alongside the grades