UCAS forms sent - just the waiting game now !

[snowyowl70]

My super organised DD1 has had email today to say her forms/reference have been received and should be at her chosen Unis in the next 48 hrs !!!!! So the waiting begins - to those seasoned parents who have done this before can you remember how long they had to wait for their first responses ? At least 2 out of her 5 may call her for interview (MFL) so am guessing these might be fairly on the ball ?

snowyowl70 welcome back to the thread. I haven't posted lately but I keep popping in to catch up.
Very interesting stuff from Ventura, Needmore and Shoooting. I hope you don't mind me saying this but I assume, from your posts that your DC have very different backgrounds to mine.
This article in the Daily Telegraph struck a chord here because this could be my DS.
Non selective state comp, in special measures to boot. Sixth form college who can offer zero help in STEP. In some ways it seems DS has to be better than the competition who are being taught STEP, in order to overcome their advantage?
He's beavering away at it anyway. Very stressful though on top of the need for stellar A levels.

My DC attend a top state school Needmoresleep and there has been no shift at all away from arts and humanities to science over the past few years, none whatsoever. It may not be typical of course, but it fits your hypothetical school profile, so I mention it.

yourlittlesecret my DS doesn't go to a state comp which is in special measures but it is the case that he had no help at all from school with his HAT - school just doesn't have the resources. That said, STEP is evidently a whole other beast and terrifying to mortals like me, so I couldn't begin to comment. But like these other tests, is it a thing you can teach?

Secret, you are right. We live in a bit of central London where state schools are very poor (and so full that DS did not get offered a place). Options were to move, find God, tutor for a Grammar or pay - with DS ending up in one of those big name schools where the teaching is first rate. There is no way DS would be in a position to apply for a RG University had he gone to our local secondary. They did not even offer the top tier for maths GCSE. Another local school cancelled science lessons for a term as they could not recruit a teacher.

It is very different from my own dippy schooling. There is almost an educational arms race out there, more evident perhaps with the ex-pats aiming for Ivy League where the achievement has to be in music, sport and leadership as well. (I lurk occasionally on the 3+ tutoring thread in Primary Education, when I need confirmation that some of the pushy parenting I see is not just a figment of my imagination, and one of the funniest recent threads was one started by Statesmom looking to get her son into Westminster.)

We know DS is lucky. He got into his school before competition for places got out of hand, and before the tutoring started in earnest. He has good, experienced teachers. As it gets harder to secure a place on a high-demand course his school is better placed to push students to meet requirements.

The requirements do seem to be getting harder. A to A* to STEP. Some, I think, is caused by overseas demand for world ranking University places. Some then, by traditional applicants raising their game. Like Central London house prices, demand keeps growing.

I am sure Universities will want to help. They also want to retain their world rankings by recruiting the best and the brightest, and will be wary of those whose potential is not proven and who may struggle to catch up. There is a limit to the extent that they can help fill educational gaps without weakening delivery of tertiary education. However they must know that many schools wont be in a position to help prepare for STEP, and that students will be left essentially on their own.

I think it is awful, very unfair, and a huge waste of potential.

What level STEP is he having to do? DS refused point blank to consider economics courses which required STEP. He tells me it is really very hard, even for strong and well-prepared mathematicians.

yourlittlesecret My DD is at a private school but I am also involved with a charity that mentors bright pupils who would not otherwise have role models / sources of knowledge within their schools and / or families / communities. Despite often having a lot of contextual factors those pupils do get into Oxbridge, including for the most competitive courses. There is a cultural predisposition to Science and to medicine in particular, and though one thing Oxbridge design their information sessions to do is to encourage students to think about careers in Science beyond medicine, they get places on the medicine courses as well as Maths, Natural Sciences etc.

Firstly if your DC's school is in special measures then contextual information will be taken into account. This gives the details of Cambridge's admission system and the use of contextual flags www.theguardian.com/education/2012/jan/10/how-cambridge-admissions-really-work.

I was a bit about that article. I know I have posted a couple of Telegraph articles but they really do need to be read in the context of their agenda which tends to seek to set private against non private, you will also see articles along the lines of "private schools are being discriminated against". It was a subjective article, one parents experience and one that seemed to have been affected by some maladministration at that. I think you have to be very careful of extrapolating anything wider from one persons experience other than it can happen, because the process is opaque, you don't know the individual circumstances or how he compared against the other candidates. The papers, and sometimes politicians, like to embrace an apparently outstanding candidate who didn't get in as evidence it is all so unfair, pandering to people's prejudices sells newspapers / gets votes. However that misses the point that many outstanding candidates don't get in. Many from private schools as well, as Needmore highlighted it is difficult for everyone. One of my DDs friends I thought had a really strong chance of getting a place at Cambridge, she has wanted to be an engineer since primary school, has entered and had success in entering all sorts of national competitions, with projects that have actually been implemented. Predicted 4 A*s and easily and consistently achieves 100% in every exam she sits etc. etc. but she was rejected. On the face of it, to me it seems bizarre but I wasn't at her interview, don't know anything about the other candidates and these shocks really do happen quite a lot.

She will also go elsewhere and have an equally good experience on excellent courses with other top students, perhaps an even better experience, as would the boy in the article if he had decided to stick with his other Maths offers. I wish your son luck but do encourage him to look beyond Oxbridge, because that is always a bit of a lottery even for the brightest candidates with all the best preparation.

I am sure someone will be along to give more information on STEP, there is certainly information on the Oxbridge threads, or you could start a new one. There are certainly people who lurk these threads who can help.

Venturabay - I did say small sample and observational. The shift towards maths is quite marked at DS' school. They do however have quite a large intake for sixth form, some from overseas, so this may be contributing.

Shootingatpigeons yes I do take your point about the article and the DT agenda. I've seen that Guardian article before.
I doubt whether DS benefited much from contextualisation as he now attends the local sixth form college which, while graded inadequate, is not in measures. In spite of that he managed to get 100% in most of his AS modules.

That said, STEP is evidently a whole other beast and terrifying to mortals like me, so I couldn't begin to comment. But like these other tests, is it a thing you can teach? I think it probably is in the sense that you can teach techniques and advanced stuff that may not be on the A level curriculum. I did manage (following great advice from MN) to get him on some summer residentials last year. One thing he learned was that in some schools, for the able maths candidates, STEP lessons were part of the curriculum.

He's doing okay, I think, and is still on the whole treating this as an aspirational endeavour. Because he has been obsessed with maths from an early age he has read and learned a huge amount which is helping him. Probably it helped him with the pre interview exam and possibly it helped him get the offer in the first place.

I, too, read the Telegraph article - bits of it out loud to DH - but my take was to say 'that poor DS- having to go to a college in October that his mother has publicly criticised and told all the world that he only got an interview because she personally intervened!'

Thing is, there are lots of people who don't get in because they fail STEP - no matter whether it's state or private. I'm just glad non of mine has needed STEP papers ( wrong subjects). And don't think that going to a private school necessarily helps with the Oxford entrance papers - my eldest two both did really, really badly on their respective subject papers and DD2 this time around reckons she crashed and burned on the TSA despite hours and hours of school input - the correlation between performing well and going to a private school isn't that strong in THIS one mothers experience!

Yes I thought the maternal intervention was mortifying.

Yes that article was very stupid, for several reasons.

State school pupils are very successful at getting into Maths at both Oxford and Cambridge.

If that lad was so passionate about maths how come he didn't go and do maths at Warwick or Imperial? How come he switched to engineering?

STEP is perfectly possible without tuition.

Oxford do the MAT.

TheBeautifulVisit Yes I wish he had gone for the MAT. At least then he would have known the outcome, good or bad, before he committed himself and would have just had to concentrate on A levels.
Glad to hear it's perfectly possible without tuition. If so then perhaps it is, after all, a good way to select the right people. If he's not up to the grade then he would not be happy there.

I actually think that my DDs would actually have taken me to court to divorce me from their parenting, if not tied me up and locked me in a cellar, if I had a. been the one to put in an official complaint (can a parent even do that?) and b. then told the world about it in a national newspaper or even just on mumsnet

I think they would have grounds as well.

She is presumably oblivious to the fact that the actual elephant in the room when her son meets his tutors will be the helicopter mother.......

My son's comp seems to get at least one pupil in for maths at Oxbridge every year and several of their pupils go on to take and pass STEP exams each year. It shouldn't be very surprising that Cambridge want a higher level of STEP than Bristol or Warwick, surely?

That Telegraph article is full of factual errors. STEP isn't a 'Cambridge special paper' (other universities are increasingly using it in maths admissions), 1 isn't the top grade (S is) and they don't require "mathematical knowledge" beyond A-level (the syllabus for STEP 1 & 2 is based on single subject A-level maths, albeit the style of the problems is different).

Being one of the significant fraction of Cambridge maths offer holders who fail to make their STEP grades would be horrid. However the underlying problem is that these days A-level maths and further maths (even with the introduction of the A* grade) don't discriminate which students are suited to studying maths at a high level.

The student room web site is very helpful for preparing for STEP: www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2403970&highlight=STEP

School STEP lessons might be an advantage, but a very small one. With the information that's publicly available (see first post in link above) a mathematically able student can prepare for STEP without any help from their school or family.

I've just read the article. The author/mum is clearly hugely well connected, who does she think she's kidding?

That's why I asked can STEP be taught?

I still the process for Cambridge mathematicians is tough.

You get your offer, tell friends and family, get congratulated and school starts boasting. But there is still a very large chance you wont get STEP, because as Cambridge bank on a number not doing so.

Being in a school where a number are taking the same exam must help, even if the exam cannot be prepared for. There will be handholding and mutual support. You can practice papers together and have a teacher help go through them, and a sense of what is reasonable preparation. You will get early warning if you are a marginal candidate, in the same way as a pupils, unsure of their A2 grades, will know not to pin their hopes too strongly on their first choice.

Best wishes to Secret's son.

I agree that the Cambridge maths admissions process is really tough, but as I said above the underlying problem is the standard of A-level maths and further maths. Blame the government for this, not Cambridge.

It's not that you can't prepare for STEP (only an excellent mathematician would do well at STEP without preparation), but that it can't be taught. Preparation for STEP involves sitting down on your own and doing past paper questions, yourself.

A lot of school maths teachers aren't good enough at maths to provide significant assistance. Having some other pupils doing STEP would help a bit, but if not there's a huge virtual STEP community on the student room (see link above), where you can get help from current and past Cambridge maths undergrads as well as other people preparing for STEP. If someone can't cope with preparing for STEP, they're unlikely to to be suited to studying maths at Cambridge (which will also involve large amounts of time working on difficult problems on their own).

Being middle class and/or attending a private school conveys many advantages in life, but making STEP maths significantly easier really isn't one of them!

I don't disagree.

My son is predicted A* in further maths, but no one has ever suggested he might consider taking it further. Oddly DD, who does not always get the same grades, shows more signs of being a natural with a creative flair to problem solving. In other circumstances STEP might be useful in preventing him from starting a degree he would find very difficult.

We are mothers, supporting our sons through the first major test of their adult lives. I am sure Secret's DS is coping, just as mine did through his UCAS saga, or others trying hard to choose University and course. I suspect it is natural that we are more alert to stress they are under, than friends and school. I guess then that the silver lining is that this first major test happens when they are at home, and that hopefully that having the maturity to get through, even if it involves invoking Plan B or C, they are then well equipped to cope with future trials: finals, finding a job etc, on their own.

And back to the point I have made repeatedly. DC are lucky that home Universities offer some world class degrees. However these are of no use if good kids going to poor schools cannot compete for places. The private/state debate is the wrong debate.

Needmore As a matter of interest do these stats include EEC students? www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/international/international-students-the-facts/by-university/ Because if they do the concentration of overseas students is in London. Our experience, DD and I's, is that they add considerably to the experience of the course. I take your point that they may be concentrated on certain courses, and driving others out, but she is on one of those STEM courses and they are not more than the general figure of a third of students, and that isn't even approaching a majority? They do raise standards as well, especially in areas like Chemistry, Maths and Cell Biology which involve difficult to grasp concepts, requiring high levels of (non verbal) reasoning ability. It does mean that DD feels she is exposed to a lot of challenge just to keep up, and incidentally she finds that not a few of the students that rise to, or even set that challenge are from state schools. I don't know whether it is serendipity but she does even know a few that they have managed to suck down south in spite of the terrible social life and having to love in a garret in Ongar (NOT). There seems to come a critical mass when it becomes less tribal and there is genuine interchange. All of these things are good preparation for a global world.

I am actually really surprised the percentage at Cambridge, and other top universities, even ones that are STEM biased such as Bath or have international reputations like Durham and Warwick, is so low. Though St Andrews is a weird blip in that (when we were considering applying there were videos of lots of down to earth scots students which made us think they had tied up the Sloanes and hidden them behind the sofa, but clearly they had hidden the overseas students as well, or are English students considered foreign? ) It has really depressed me seeing the figures for the universities DD is going in circles considering, she won't be needing Mandarin . I wonder if anyone can confirm the prejudice that the Maths Economics and Engineering courses are packed to the gills with Asian mathematical genius's (or what ever the plural is ) DD actually came out with that prejudice about Imperial in general the other day, but it isn't supported by the figures.

I also actually like the idea of aptitude and skill tests, partly because I think they level the playing field for those disadvantaged by poor schools (or Learning Difficulties). If they require preparation rather than teaching and practise then they provide an opportunity to provide some objective evidence of skills and abilities. Employers do that extensively, even more so these days, often as ways of culling applicants so it seems a rational response by Oxbridge to having to distinguish between candidates in a very competitive field and find a way of increasing fair access by giving people additional chances to demonstrate talent. Often state school applicants who have crawled through all the hoops to have the motivation to apply in the first place will actually have the talents that enable them to do well (unless they have been pushed by a massively attention seeking Telegraph reading mother, I didn't think she had connections, just a sense of entitlement)

I obviously can't comment on STEP though and I don't really understand why you would make that a step in the process after interviews and offers

She seemed to have sufficiently good connections to get free tutoring from a Westminster teacher. To my mind, that's reasonable connections in the circumstances. Absolutely excruciating for the DS in question to have that article published.

Needmoresleep if someone was complaining that it was unfair that some schools don't even offer Further maths, I'd be in complete agreement. However what's being complained about on this thread is essentially differences in degrees of privilege. [My perspective on this comes from having a working class background, studying physics at Oxford, and now (as an academic) spending a significant fraction of my time on outreach activities with students from Widening Participation backgrounds.]

The irony of this discussion is that maths is a subject in which an able student can excel with very limited help from school or parents. The challenge is helping those students realize what's possible (and overcoming `Oxbridge isn't for the likes of us' style predjudices).

As someone pointed out above, Oxford (and also Imperial) use the MAT instead of STEP. Warwick accept a distinction in the Advance Extension Award instead of STEP. So not wanting to sit STEP doesn't preclude studying maths at one of the best universities (for undergraduate maths) in the country. In 2013 nearly 4000 people got A* in Further maths. Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick and Imperial, between them have of order 1000 places a year. So it's inevitable that they have to use some additional criteria to decide who to accept. The current situation (a choice of additional challenging exams, some of which are taken pre-offer, some post) might not be ideal, but it's a very difficult problem.

Shooting I am not sure what your post is about.

A conversation about cliqueness will go round and round. Some students embrace diversity, others, given half a chance will stay within their comfort zones. Some might have a problem with Sloanes, or Americans, but embrace the diversity that groups of Chinese or Europeans will bring. Some, from their schooling, will used to multi-nationalism and multiculturalism. A campus and shared activities might bring people together. Sharing flats with people from your own background somewhere along the Northern line might not.

Student Room is illuminating. It is clear that some students from ordinary backgrounds outside London find the LSE quite tough. But then the same happened in my day. I certainly struggled in my first year from being the only female and the only Brit on my course, with several from cultures where men's opinions counted more than womens.

I think the solution is for a student to first recognise what they want from University. If it is lots of rugby followed by drinking in the bar, then look for the right place. If University is just about getting the best degree possible and mixing with others, from wherever, is not important, that is also valid. Then accept that you may need to work harder to find what you want in different places. In London you might have to slog out to playing fields in the far suburbs to meet people with whom you share interests. Or work harder with people of different backgrounds to find a commonality.

I picked up the figures quoted at the talk I went to. No idea how they match with the figures you present. (Undergraduate, postgraduate, EU or whatever.) I suspect also this is one of those things which is quite hard to pin down. A couple of HK applicants with British links,that I know, found Universities varied in whether they would treat them as British or overseas students. Nationalities will also vary from course to course depending on the reputation and prestige various subjects enjoy in home countries.

FWIW several on the LSE thread regret not having taken up offers at UCL, which they suggest is less cliquey.

I'm stlll at that journalist getting STEP help from Westminster school for her state educated son but still complaining when he fell short. Beathtaking in its sense of entitlement.

STEP is meant to be challenging. It's there to help admissions distinguish between the amazing at maths and absolutely incredible at maths.

Shooting - I've read your post 3 times and have found it incoherent and confusing 3 times.

I expect Cambridge admissions are going to regret changing their minds about interviewing journo- mum's son: their phones will be jammed with parents hoping to achieve similar next year.

Needmore I was just trying to get some actual perspective beyond the stereotypes, and to counter them a bit, so I was probably rambling. I was genuinely surprised at the low percentage of overseas students outside London. I had always had the impression from all sources, academics, students etc. that increased competition was driven by the number and standard of overseas students, particularly in STEM subjects. It doesn't surprise me at all that LSE faces that in the extreme. The Economics course in particular really is one with huge prestige worldwide, certainly where I have lived, as great if not greater than Oxbridge, and the capital city is an added draw. Anyway we can continue this discussion offline . I wouldn't want to confuse anyone with my questioning .

And yes the definition of home student does seem to be flexible according to how much they want the student.