Looking for the helpful Cambridge admissions tutor who posted a while age..

[seeker]

......if you're around, could I ask a couple of questions, please?

A friend of ours, who is a Professor of Mathematics at Imperial and has taught undergraduates at Columbia and has also taught at super-prestigious French grandes écoles told us recently that the Imperial UGs were much the most clever. Maybe the British selection process is the best at selecting the brightest.

What is WP?

upthechimney one of things that comes up time and time again in the widening access prog I'm part of, is that the profs do want to access the brightest and the best whatever backgorund they come from.

However, though it may be an uncomfortable fact, many of those brightest and best will also be privileged.

Ah, widening participation.

The GCSE A* requirements at many universities is the death knell for widening participation surely? My eldest son is a third year medic and his cohort are scarily privileged in many different ways.

Well offers can and are contextualised so an A* offer may be made to an applicant from a high perfroming school and a lower offer made to an applicant from a low achieving school.

I think the A Level A requirement could add a clang or two Frieda*. Where is your DS? Is it a particularly rah uni? I don't especially get the sense that DS1's peers are privileged across the board (first year), they seem a pretty good mix.

Frieda was referring to the GCSE calculation word, not the offer at A2.

Ah, my mistake.

Poof...it's all a bit of a conundrum, isn't it?

I mean you want applicants from a wide range of backgrounds. Of course you do. But you have to hold fast on academic rigour.

As far as I can tell it is insoluble. At the mo we have a high offer (AAA) which reduces the number of applicants across the board and should mean we are selecting from within a narrow band of high-achievers. But to address the fact that a student from a low income family who achieves AAA at a comp in Rotherham which rarely sends anyone to a RG Uni looks very different to a student achieving AAA at Westminster we also have a WP programme which means we can make lower offers to level the playing field - which looks like discretion but is in fact pretty limited because we can only make very slightly lower offers to students in very narrowly defined categories. And this is very intransparent because students do not know before they apply how the discretion will be exercised. And different unis vary in how they exercise their discretion too. I know some that are more flexible than us.

The alternative would be to lower our standard offer and attract more applications across the board and then select within them. But this would involve the exercise of considerable discretion, greater intransparency and probably upset the independent school heads who are already mistrustful of WP even more (I'm not worried about their opinion but if they get upset then it upsets the media, worries students and parents and all contributes to the impression that the process is arbitrary when it simply isn't).

It also upsets candidates who very much exceed standard offers when they get rejected.

And isn't it pretty much what Oxford has been doing for quite some while now PPP, with no obvious ill effects and possibly some advantage?

Bonsoir in the olden days the standard offer was EE which almost all offerees would have exceeded except for the exceptionally laid back and neat. Some form of additional test is universal for all courses at Oxford and Cambridge again now so I can't see really see why the upset of disappointed applicants is material. Surely all it does is reinforce the fact that there's more to it at that level than A Level grades?

Which option is what Oxford does?

Keeping the standard offer low(ish) relative to the ability of its offerees, as you must well know PPP.

Not in my discipline (law) where the standard offer remains AAA and they use the same admissions test as us - but since unis which use this admission test can decide for themselves what level they want students to attain on it (i.e. what the notional 'pass' mark is) we are back in scenario A. In practice they probably fall in the group of unis which exercise more discretion than us but not masses.

And since Oxford regularly gets hammered for failing to admit enough students from minority ethnic groups, or state schools or whatever I'm not sure the 'no ill effects' statement is accurate either. I am sure they get the brightest and best students. I am pretty impressed with the students we get too. Getting bright students is not hard. Getting bright students to apply and get accepted from every sector of society is hard. I don't think anyone at Oxford is complacent about that.

One thing that I think helps is communicating that the process is transparent and if you have good grades and perform well in admissions tests you'll get a place, that you won't be at a disadvantage because you lack work experience in chambers or chose Business Studies A Level. I think this because these are the kinds of queries I field most frequently in the UCAS filling in form period. Any process that introduces more discretion into the admissions process therefore gives the wrong impression and discourages applications - especially from schools which rarely send students to certain unis and where people may lack the confidence to send the admissions tutor a quick e-mail (I realise I keep referring to Russell Group on this thread like it is badge of honour, I don't actually think that, it is just a convenient shorthand).

But conversely without discretion we can't apply common sense to impressive applicants from seriously disadvantaged backgrounds - which there may be more scope for doing at Oxford.

Which is, as I say, an insoluble conundrum.

I'm not sure about the 'must well know' point either. I don't work at Oxford and have never studied there (did go to t'other place - perhaps that accounts for my deficiencies). I had to check out their standard offer online. If you aren't applying yourself why would you know?

I'm not applying to Cambridge at the moment either PPP nor likely to be applying in the immediate future, but I happen to know what your standard offer for Law is.

A offers as standard throw up obvious problems. Start ramping up the A's required as standard and you create even more problems.

I don't know why universities don't ask for AAA from independent school applicants, AAA from super selective school applicants, AAA from grammars, comps and academies in certain wealthy postcodes and ABB from everyone else, perhaps even BBB for those receiving FSMs. It would sort out quite a lot of what's wrong with our education system.

The GCSE A requirement is a disaster for WA. Now DS2 is at a comp, I see the culture is completely different from his old highly selective fee paying school which nannied them through GCSEs. There is zero hand holding at the comp and far too many exams sat early with little or no communication home. I reckon the same student attaining 10 A grades at the fee paying school would struggle to achieve 1 A* at the comp UNLESS there is a fully invested parent hovering.

A A A* from independent school applicants.

Maybe the solution is to outlaw the nannying,LittleFrieda?

Well littlefrieda that certainly puts paid to the much proffered MN classic that 'a bright child will do well anywhere' ...

But here's the thing...

A*s at GCSE aren't that hard to achieve. And a highly selective univeristy should be able to expect their students to have a good hand of them, particularly in pertinent subjects. It shows a host of abilities they will need to thrive at undergrad level.

Without a good hand of A*s (and I don't mean a perfect 10), I can't see how admissions tutors can make a good estimate of ability, talent and liklihood to thrive.

They can't drop their base level expectations to somehow shoehorn in applicants from really crap schools.

As for making offers static based on where the applicant went to school...I don't think that's necessarily a good thing.

Admissions tutors want a certain degree of flexibility.

They want the people they feel will best thrive!

Word factory - I don't think that's true about GCSEs. Why don't admissions tutors ask for their MidYis score as well as their GCSE grades, AS grades acheived (with UMS) and predicted grades? Lots of bright and exceptionally bright pupils underperform at GCSE.

Have any uni admissions departments ever analysed performance in degree against MidYis scores? I suspect it will be closer correlation than GCSE results. Cambridge certainly seem to think AS results are a better indicator than GCSE results.

The interest of GCSEs lies also in the comparability of candidates. Better candidates for good universities usually take the full range of academic subjects and so are easy to compare against one anothee whereas spécialisation thereafter makes direct comparison harder.

Bonsoir - GCSE subjects also vary enormously. Is a business studies GCSE equal currency to an English Literature IGCSE?

I would advise an exceptionally bright child to sit only Maths, English Language and a modern language GCSEs and be a conscientious objector to the rest. If you acheived A* in those three exams and high AS results and predicted grades in subjects suitable for the university course, I don't think a top university would discriminate against you.