Year 13 2023/2024 - General support thread

[Rollergirl11]

It’s now the time for our young adults to sit their final year at sixth form/college. Everyone is welcome!

Sorry about your lovely little boy cat Rollergirl

Really sorry about your cat @Rollergirl11

I think DS might be the first to have a uni offer on here? Has anyone else?

He's just been made an offer for Royal Holloway for History.

@Rollergirl11 poor cat, so sorry to read this...sending unmumsnetty hugs.

@lifeturnsonadime it's the first offer I've heard about - brilliant news! Is that your DS's first choice?

No it's not his first choice he's applying to Oxford, but it's a great insurance option. He is autistic and had such extreme anxiety growing up he was unable to be in school for any of high school and has below par GCSEs as compared to his predicted A Levels, so the certainty of an offer at a good university is brilliant for his confidence.

@lifeturnsonadime
congratulations to your ds!

Oh no @Rollergirl11 so sorry.

Congratulations to your DS @lifeturnsonadime.

Brilliant news @lifeturnsonadime, first offer I've heard of and RH has an amazing campus. Nice confidence boost.

@Rollergirl11 - what sad news. Sending  to you all. Poor little cat.

@lifeturnsonadime - congrats to your ds on his offer. How exciting!

So sorry to hear that @Rollergirl11

Well done @lifeturnsonadime the first thread offer

Just found you all!

I have been looking into offer rates for Eng Lit and sort of wish I hadn’t. They have plunged over the last 5 years or so to a bizarre extent. It appears that for non-contextual applicants Durham is about 20%, as is St Andrews. Five years ago it was more like 50%.

It feeds into the issue of how many “top” unis to list - with offer rates that low one can’t really afford not to put quite a few as otherwise even as a decent candidate, one might not get any target firm offers.

@Revengeofthepangolins this is of interest as DD is applying for English lit. But I’m afraid i don’t really understand what you are saying. Offer rates are low in comparison to what? Are you saying there are less places available for English lit then there were 5 years ago?

The ratio of offers to applications 5 years ago was much higher than in the 2022 round. Partly this seems to have been caused by a big drop in number of offers at both unis in 2022, which I don’t know the reason for or whether it remained the case for the 2023 intake, partly gently declining offer rates over the period and party divergence between contextual and standard offer rates. When I get home I can dig out a snap of the numbers they posted

@Revengeofthepangolins it's possible this is also affected by the number of overseas students - DS is interested in Business but his top choice of Durham makes far more offers to overseas students than to uk - it's a book-balancing thing...

DD also applying for English lit so would be interested to see application/offer statistics. It would also be useful to overlay the calibre of applicants - are the people being rejected mainly those who applied aspirationally, for example?

Hello all.

@Rollergirl11 so sorry to hear your news.

@legosunqueen we are going to the Liverpool open day in a few weeks and I know DS is keen (I think he is envisaging some level of part time job at Anfield).

@lifeturnsonadime that is great news. We haven’t even applied yet, so a way to go.

Having a go at posting the Durham English stuff I mentioned. You can see the sources stuff on Whatdotheyknow. I don't know what happened in 2022 (meaning students starting uni in Sept 2022) - they slashed the number of offers and took it all out of non-contextuals. Doesn't look just like a post-TAG adjustment.

Hmmm. A bit ugly, but if you click on the table I think it displays better

Durham had bulge years in 2020 and 2021 due to TAGs/CAGs, so slashed the number of places on lots of courses in 2022 as they couldn't cope with the number of students otherwise.

I am hoping that is the explanation, although a 40% cut is pretty extreme. Very hard luck on any non-contextual applicant that year if that was the cause.

Interestingly, St A's has the same slashing of number of offers, but theirs continued the next year too I think.

My DD is going into her second year at Durham and she was told by one of her tutors (not English) that they were halving their 2023 intake vs previous year to get student numbers more manageable - so sounds like they were more proactive in doing that the year before in English. Hopefully everything will settle down for people going in 2024 and numbers will return to normal.

DD has a cold. She still went to a house party last night but compromised by not staying over (which she never really enjoys anyway).

Hope she’s feeling better soon not least because her bedroom is next to ours and she is coughing!

@GoldenRuby ah - that makes sense

Thanks for all the well wishes everyone. We are missing him terribly, as is our older cat. DH wants to get another kitten straight away but I think I need a bit of time.

Fairly quiet week for us. Have an inset day on Friday. Then we have Warwick open day on Saturday and DD will submit her UCAS application after that.

We have a train to Birmingham for the open day Saturday morning but DS has gone to Spain with college and apparently will land early hours. Not sure if he will fancy it, it is an outlier anyway.

After a slightly tortuous weekend DD has produced a decent pass of her PS. It's way too long, but at least it gives her something to finesse now. She's also the only person at her school wanting to go on and study English so is inundated with offers from English teachers (well, she's had 2) to review it for her.

In case it helps others - DD has been trying for ages to work out what she wants to say in her personal statement and how to structure it and spending most time writing stuff, then deleting it (and going for coffee with her friend to work on it, to come back with one line written).

In the end I made her have a conversation with me at the weekend about why she wanted to study English at university. After a lot of don't knowing and awkward laughs, DD started talking freely and I made some notes. At the end I pointed out that she'd spoken very eloquently about her love for the subject making x,y and z points and she'd mentioned particular types of literature and themes that she's especially interested in and the wider reading/investigation she'd carried out to enhance her knowledge - and this was all a great basis for her PS.

So - if your DC is similarly "stuck" - talking it through rather than trying to write might help?