Is 13 too young to think about Oxbridge?

[lottieandmia]

My dd is a brilliant artist and I had thought that she would want to go to art college. But she's also turned out to be very academic and one of her teachers described her to me as 'brilliant' at the last parents evening.

i think that she might possibly be able to try for a place at Oxbridge and she's interested in the idea but I don't know much about the interview process. My best friend went to Magdalen - she said they ask unusual questions. It may be that it doesn't suit her but I thought it would be worth considering.

Not much to add except that a Classics degree is absolutely ideal for any future choreographer!

So, so, so much theatre is based on classical myth, philosophy and understanding - I'd imagine it's quite hard to feel on top of things with no knowledge of this area of learning.

But no, of course 13 isn't too young to be looking to the future - as long as options are kept open and any change of plan isn't seen as failure.

'Random'? Not sure anyone working in admissions would be too happy about that.

www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/10/how-cambridge-admissions-really-work

I knew plenty of exceptional candidates who didn't get a place. And knew plenty of students at my university/college who probably shouldn't have been there and left with very weak grades. Every year schools remain stunned by some of the outcomes. I'm sure Admissions tutors do their absolute best of a challenging task. But humans, and their decision-making processes, will never be perfect!

My brother wanted Oxbridge from day 1 and now , because he didn't get anywhere near it, he has refused to go to any of the Unis that did offer a place . Don't push for oxbridge, any top 10 uni is fantastic and frankly Oxbridge students are often very cliquey and shun the working class students. Also she will need minimum 5 A GCSE and 3/4 A A-levels to get in. My sister got well above those and didn't get in still ( Shed also volunteered in Kenya, did DofE and played a sport at county level) ...

The admissions processes at both universities take up a lot of time, energy and money.

Everyone involved does their level best.

But it is an imperfect process of course and in any case there are simply far too many excellent applicants for the number of places on offer.

Every year there will be wonderful applicants who would have thrived who don't get offfered places.

Just like all other extremely competitive courses.

In answer to your op. Yes.

edge very few offers made by either university will include 3 or 4 A*s at A level.

Indeed, Oxford still regularly make 3A offers ( though many offerees will outperform their offer).

'Stunned' is also a strong word.

There was a very able, high-achieving friend of my daughter's who applied to read PPE at Oxford and who didn't get offered a place. My daughter was a bit surprised - but then it is highly competitive and none of us can be a fly on the wall during interviews and subsequent discussions.

As to people who are admitted then not doing brilliantly. Well there are all sorts of possibilities. Emotional maturity that lags behind intellectual maturity. Family problems that rear their head at inconvenient times. The fact that young people are still developing. Drink, drugs, unhappy love affairs, ill health - whether physical or menta..l

Totally agree with nightswimming. I think stunned is apt. About half my school year went on to Oxbridge, and some of the admissions choices were funky - one of the amazingly bright academic scholars was rejected, but a girl was accepted who struggled at my college and left with a third. Equally, of my three cousins, two got in, and the one who didn't was the brightest of the three.

When the time comes, you have to explain admissions is a lottery, not everyone who deserves to go can possibly go, and they end up with plenty of students who struggle to keep up.

As to people who are admitted then not doing brilliantly. Well there are all sorts of possibilities

While it's true there are plenty of students with issues ranging from straightforward shyness to anxiety disorders, eating disorders, family problems, self harm, drug & alcohol etc; ime it was generally that some turned out not to be as academically able as they had seemed.

When the time comes, you have to explain admissions is a lottery, not everyone who deserves to go can possibly go, and they end up with plenty of students who struggle to keep up.

In 20+ years I have never yet admitted a student who struggled to keep up because of lack of ability. I have admitted a few who don't work as much as they should or who have personal/medical issues that prevent them doing as well as they could.

Equally, of my three cousins, two got in, and the one who didn't was the brightest of the three.

According to what criteria was the third the brightest?

Schools and parents are often very poor at judging who has the best potential for high level academic study. Academics are actually remarkably consistent in their judgements - interview scores from different interviews are typically very much in line with one another. "Surprises" in Oxbridge entrance often come from schools/parents misjudging academic potential not from "randomness" in the process.

Of course it will always be true that there isn't that much to choose between the last person who gets an offer and the person just below them in the ranking. But it really isn't a random process. (And if the person just below the last offer is very close to the person who got the last offer then they will be pooled and given the chance to be picked up by other college.)

For OP: you shouldn't be focussing on Oxbridge rather than the top tier universities as a wider group. Your teacher saying that your DD is very bright means little more at this stage than your DD has the potential to do well in GCSEs and A levels.

That's impressive user - but possibly not all academics have such incisive judgment because I can think of quite a number of my cohort at Cambridge who struggled because it just wasn't for them. Some in sciences, some engineering, some law, some languages. Probably a couple of them didn't work hard enough or there were other difficulties . But some worked incredibly hard to make the grade and it was very sad when they just couldn't.

In 20+ years I have never yet admitted a student who struggled to keep up because of lack of ability

Well you would say that wouldn't you.

And how do you define ability. There are plenty of people with ability who don't manage to harvest it for different reasons - not necessarily for lack of effort or personal issues.

I don't class able students who don't work as 'struggling' - they're just lazy; and some people with personal/mental health issues manage not to let it impact their academic performance.

According to what criteria was the third the brightest?

For a start he had a much higher IQ score, but that doesn't tell you much. He did exceptionally well at school, better than the other two, and went on to a brilliant academic career, respected internationally, and has won awards for his work. His siblings are perfectly competent hardworking professionals, but unremarkable. They're nice, but not terribly interesting and don't stand out intellectually in any way.

What criteria do you use - essentially exam results, your own entrance exam if applicable, school reports, and interviews. Any means of judgement has its limitations.

I'm not sure consistency in interview scores tells you much other than academics in one institution tend to have a similar perspective. I'd be more interested to compare interview scores with a student's overall performance at uni and final outcome.

And yet Cambridge has very low dropout rates and very low numbers of students getting less than 2:2s. This indicates that it's just not true that students are working hard and still failing to make the grade.

(Again in 20+ years I have never seen a student get below a 2:2 if they worked reasonably.)

It may well be true that some Cambridge graduates with mid 2:1 degrees might have gotten a higher class degree elsewhere. But the degree classification is pretty much irrelevant unless you want to be an academic. A Cambridge 2:1 usually opens at least as many doors as a First from another RG university.

I'd be more interested to compare interview scores with a student's overall performance at uni and final outcome.

They are correlated. Not sure you can get this information from a FoI request but you are welcome to try - we've nothing to hide.

BTW in my subject "pretest" scores are also very strongly correlated with degree outcome.

I would also comment that Oxbridge is (at least for now) very international. The majority of academics interviewing in my subject did not actually study at Oxbridge themselves, nor go through the UK education system. Quite a few of them will only have joined the department within the last few years. So it is highly non-trivial that they nonetheless score applicants at interview very similarly.

To the person who asked how a 7 year old would know anything about Oxbridge - in our case it would probably be because their parents and grandparents studied at Cambridge and we talk about it. Mainly when we get alumni magazines that reveal what our contemporaries are getting up to now. I don't think we should be expected to keep that a secret until they reach some magical age when they are "allowed" to think about their future.

I absolutely knew I wanted to go to Cambridge when I was 13. My parents used to work at the university, we'd been there lots of times to visit and I just loved the atmosphere.

This all makes very depressing reading. DD is academically able (mostly As and A*s at GCSE) , but very shy and suffers from social anxiety. She would absolutely fail any university interview because when she is put on the spot she clams up and won't talk.

How on earth is she going to get a university place if she needs to pass an interview as well as get good A level grades?

My DD had designs on Oxford from an early age, and loved the city when we went for a tourist visit (we live not too far away).
However, it was only when actually applying for Uni that she discovered the courses at Cambridge (for her subject) were much more up her street, and she actually apologised to me for wanting a trip to Cambridge to check it out! It was just another in the many Uni trips she made, and happily she ended up at Cambridge.
I agree with the others though, nothing wrong in aiming high and having aspirations, but please don't forget to discuss the many many other fantastic Uni's that this country has.
(DS said there was no way he was applying to either when he saw the workload they dealt you, and he went to a very high achieving grammar school that churns out Oxbridge applicants)

My dd is 13 and discuses uni (oxford and Cambridge), I try and tell her to concentrate on gcse first but her teachers seem to be pushing her towards a level choices already. There seems to be a lot of pressure at school these days. Parents evening was last week and teachers are already trying to persuade her to take their subjects for her options, maths teacher recommended she takes a level maths and her English teacher said the same. She knows that she wants to study English lit at uni and has always said she wants to teach. All could change though so I try not to push her towards anything.

How on earth is she going to get a university place if she needs to pass an interview as well as get good A level grades?

Most uni places are offered with no interview. Obviously Oxbridge do, and medicine/vets. Among her (non medic hopeful) friends, my DD was the exception with 5 interviews (camb. and 4 RG elec eng) - but apart from Cambridge they were nice friendly chats, some with a bit of maths. And it turns out that if through nerves you integrate instead of differentiating its fine.

If it helps, DD's school is planning an outreach trip to Oxford & asked various pupils if they'd be interested in going on it, that was a while back so start yr 10 (though not sure exactly when it's going to happen). So I guess they / whichever college/dept is organising the outreach trip thinks 14 is a perfectly good age to be thinking about it . . .

I imagine they hope to encourage the pupils to work hard and aim high for GCSEs & beyond, which has to be a good thing regardless of what they decide to do in 4 yrs time.

(I didn't ask why they were going to such a second rate university, and when the trip to Cambridge would be happening )

As to people who are admitted then not doing brilliantly. Well there are all sorts of possibilities.

I am probably talking about myself here. I was physically and emotionally abused in the house where I grew up, and assumed that when I went to university this would constitute escape.

Which on one level it did, but I had to go home in the holidays. And being among lively intelligent people at university made the oppressive silent atmosphere at home still worse.

This was in an era where pastoral care was less good than it is now, and the abuse was simply not young people's radar. There were relatively few mixed colleges, and even in the ones there was, there was a very masculine atmosphere.

Having grown up in a very peculiar atmosphere, I could only deal with aspects of collegiate life - which I think was very much an extension of boarding school life - by wearing a mask. Which cracked sometimes.

I did get a lot out of my studies and didn't do badly. I just know if there wasn't so much I was struggling to contain, I might well have done better.

So I'm not sure about the comment some people with personal/mental health issues manage not to let it impact their academic performance

I think it's not a matter of a lack of will-power and determination. I had those - and frankly without them I'd probably have ended up dead in a ditch long ago. But I also feel that with a more stable and nurturing background, I would have been able to approach my studies without having to constantly shut the door on massive unhappiness.

DD is academically able (mostly As and As at GCSE) , but very shy and suffers from social anxiety. She would absolutely fail any university interview because when she is put on the spot she clams up and won't talk.*

Most universities don't interview. Those that do make allowances for social anxiety.

At the same time, anxiety issues cannot be entirely ignored - and indeed could not be ignored when applying for jobs later - as the student will need to talk in tutorials, work in groups, deal with tight deadlines etc. Anxiety is probably the single most common reason we see for students dropping out/suspending their studies. So it is important for students with anxiety to declare their problems, and to be ready to take the help and support offered by universities to deal with their anxieties. Ultimately competitive courses like Oxbridge ones have to make judgments about whether a student is going to be able to cope with the demands of a very stressful course.

When DS was 11 he decided that he wanted to go to MIT.