aspirational choice/wasted choice

[socharlotte]

Ds wants to do Meng mechanical Engineering.he is predicted AAA in maths physics chemistry. At AS he was hovering about 90% for all 3 (bit more in maths) .Is it worth applying for one place that asks for A* AA? These tend to all be very popular and oversubscribed choices.i would imagine it would be quite risky for the university to 'waste' one of their offeres on a student predicted only AAA, but on the other hand I can't help thinking grade prediction is highly subjective and another school might have given him the benefit of the doubt.The school might well up his prediction if he really wanted them to , but they have made it clear it is usually not in the students best interests to inflate predicted grades. I am not really sure why this would be - but I can understand they would not want credibility of the school's grade predictions generally to be undermined

Go for it, you still have the other choices. It is IMO always good to put down an aspirational choice.

Yes, go for it. IMO one choice should be aspiration and one insurance and the other 2 in the middle.

DD1 asked that although her school had a policy of not predicting A*, could they make an exception for her. Which they were happy to do, based on her results to date. I'd say go for it, it's only one choice, so long as he has "safer" choices as well.

I would encourage your DS to apply, it's only one of his chouces. I would also talk to the school about upping his predictions if your son can convince them he would put in the extra effort.

I would go for it if it's somewhere he'd like to go - has he been to an open day there? Agree it's good to have an aspirational but only if it's somewhere he can see himself going.

DS picked a range and got 5 offers but his first choice, after visiting, wasn't the "best" uni or the toughest to get into of his choices so it was all a bit academic (no pun intended).

Ds has just been offered an interview for his aspirational choice

Congratulations to your son Soprano.

IMHO, if you don't get rejected from one university course, then you probably weren't aiming high enough in the first place . . .

I agree with the others and would say go for it too, especially as the cap on anything above ABB has been lifted allowing unis to admit as many as students as they want, so come August they may be more willing to take someone who narrowly misses the offer.

Not sure that follows boomting. My DC have only had two rejections in four applications and those were from the two least competitive places.

I know at least up to last year some universities didn't pay any attention to A predictions since they didn't think schools to be accurate about them, so yes I would encourage one (maybe 2) AAA choices in your ds's situation. Especially if he's prepared to work hard.

I know one university that keeps records of schools, predictions and outcomes of their applicants, and for schools that consistently overpredict, discount their predictions, so the school is right to be cautious, but can you ask them to put the UMS averages in the reference?

DS applied to one Uni that quoted a standard offer of AAA, and they offered him AAA or AAB - so you never know.