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 ?

[BeckAndCall]

That's really interesting tactics by Birmingham - thanks for the explanations. ( I wonder if other RG will follow suit in the coming years?)

And my DD1 loved Birmingham and made them her insurance offer - they came close for her. Personally, of all the campuses I've visited, the Vale is the student residence village that has most made me wish I was 18 again....

[Shootingatpigeons]

Beckandcall "I wonder if the other RG will follow suit" You got my marketing brain going with that so did a bit of searching on the press coverage / some market research with DD My impression it was a scheme for STEM / vocational course arose because they first trialled this last year with 300 unconditional places offered mainly on stem/ vocational courses. It increased the acceptance rate from a quarter to a third which is why they have expanded the scheme this year to 1000 places and to any course that wants to use it. Last year only a couple of students "crashed and burned" after taking their foot off the breaks as a result of accepting the offer, as my DD says if you are intelligent enough to be predicted 3 As you are intelligent enough to know you need to do well in any case. So now students are getting unconditional offers for subjects like English and History too. Interestingly the offers do not seem to be going to the very brightest, the students who are getting them at DDs school are not the Oxbridge candidates applying for the same subject, presumably they are identifying which applications were submitted to the Oxbridge deadline, or cut off at the most stellar UMS points, and are not targeting them.

Of course the buyer behaviour for humanities courses may be a bit different, I certainly feel DD should be putting position in the subject tables near the top of the list of factors affecting her decision, but if those conversion rates continue then I think the other RG will have to seriously consider following. Aside from the improvement in conversion rates the offers have created a buzz at school and I would imagine more of the Lower Sixth will now consider Birmingham as a result, and as we discussed if they can get students to visit they have the campus and courses which will persuade them to apply.

So I am not at all sure this does smack of desperation. In marketing you tend to have innovators and followers of marketing strategies. The innovators take the risk it won't work but if it does work they obviously take an advantage in increasing market share, and followers are left responding with decreasing returns. The market for bright students has changed, it is now very different from the brutal environment my DD and her peers competed for places in four years ago. Universities have to respond or end up as Southampton admitted (last year?) being hundreds of students short. In that environment Birmingham look more like successful innovators?

[BeckAndCall]

It's an interesting changing market for sure.

Current DD applicant is my last one going for an UG course so the future changes won't directly affect us, but like you shooting I reflect how different it was for DD1 - three years older - scrambling for the last places in the £3k fee regime. That was a horrible year but it worked out OK for her in the end....

Now, changing the subject completely, I've got my eldest 2 both starting masters next year with no student loan funding available!! The bank of mum and dad remains open for business for another year........

[Shootingatpigeons]

beck yes my DD was lucky too but she had a few friends forced into gap years, retakes etc. because they missed an A by a few UMS marks and there was absolutely no flexibility.

She has been lucky that her uni is giving her a remission on the master's fees but I must admit we hadn't woken up to the fact that she won't get a loan ...... Already feeling guilty that DD2 will be saddled with so much more debt and for a degree that won't so seamlessly slot into a career (DD1 wants to be a research Scientist).

[2rebecca]

We still have unconditionals in Scotland, all the Scottish universities my son is looking at say their minimum is xxxxx grade at higher or xxx at A level. Some of them like you to be going for advanced highers but unconditionals are still fairly common unlike applying for English unis where most he looked at wanted advanced highers.

[lalsy]

Hello, have a dd in UCAS mode at the moment, congratulations to all dc who are getting offers now.

Shootingpigeons, what an interesting post, thank you. Do you think the same arguments will apply once AS levels vanish? At the moment, in most cases, these unconditional offers are presumably being made with half the marks in the bag and with a track record of achievement at roughly the right level? The gap between GCSE and A2 is so big, I wonder if they will have so much confidence in their predictions then.

[Shootingatpigeons]

Ialsy well neither the schools or unis are happy about the loss of AS for exactly that reason. Perhaps some of the uni admissions officers can comment but I would imagine it will make them more risk averse. I initially thought it was tough on them sitting sets of public exams three years in a row but it allowed my DDs to road test 4 subjects to help them to decide whether and which subjects to reduce to 3, and it allowed my DD to prove herself after being a casualty of the GCSE English marking which clearly the universities have discounted in making her offers.

Good luck to your DD.

[snowyowl70]

Yes !!!!! Another unconditional offer from Birmingham for DD1 for modern languages !!!!

[snowyowl70]

Don't think she will accept it though - really wants to go to Southampton !

[lalsy]

I agree Shootingatpigeons, and most schools would make them do internal exams in yr 12 using past papers anyway, I guess. I'd have thought it removes a lot of the uncertainty about predictions and university entrance generally too, as they've got a firmer basis on which to make conditional offers, never mind these unconditional ones. Mmm. Well done mini-snowyowl!

[BeckAndCall]

But if there are no AS levels to go by - how will Cambridge decide who to interview? As you know, they use not only grades, but raw UMS scores to preselect their candidates for interview.

[mindgone]

I guess they would revert back to whatever they used to do pre AS levels!

[Bonsoir]

ShootingatPigeons - I am less optimistic than you! I think that third tier universities are getting very anxious and are in desperation mode.

[Bonsoir]

"But if there are no AS levels to go by - how will Cambridge decide who to interview? As you know, they use not only grades, but raw UMS scores to preselect their candidates for interview."

Cambridge, like other universities, receives a huge volume of applications from pupils who have not done GCSE/AS and are not doing A-levels and they seem to manage to select candidates for interview using other criteria.

[BeckAndCall]

On the Cambridge issue, if you look at their application statistics and their application procedures, great weight is given to their internally created spreadsheets showing best of 4 UMS marks, best of 3 UMS marks and 3 science UMS marks - their preselection criteria are designed around the thresholds for these scores.

Yes, they must have done something different before AS papers and yes, they do it differently for non AS candidates ( although the majority are AS candidates) but I was wondering how they would change once the AS levels are dropped.

Cambridge have already said that they don't find GSCE results to be a good predictor, so they'll have to use something else, and I was wondering what that might be.

[Shootingatpigeons]

Well done to your DD, fingers crossed for Soton snowyowl

Beckandcall I agree it is a difficult market for them but my point was that necessity is the mother of invention and that this innovation does seem to have had benefits for Birmingham.

As I think a lot of the evidence produced to support the schools' and universities' arguments manifested that any other methods of assessing candidates will be more subjective and therefore that universities will be more risk averse and that will most affect already disadvantaged candidates. Cambridge said it would set their Fair Access programme back ten years. DDs school are saying they will turn to alternative qualifications to redress the problem for their pupils.

Just don't get me started on Gove. I am a Historian with a 17 year old DD with special needs, it borders on victimisation

[Shootingatpigeons]

Beck my second para addressed the AS issue (I have a stinking cold and an even more foggy brain than normal today)

[Shootingatpigeons]

not special needs either , Specific learning difficulties, I will go back to bed

[Isthiscorrect]

Bonsoir, are you implying that Birmingham is third tier? Just a bit worried, I thought they were ok and they are ds first choice. I'd hate to think they were third tier.

[Bonsoir]

In the RG there are first tier universities (Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, Oxford, UCL), second tier universities (Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, King's, Manchester, Warwick) and third tier (the rest). This is of course not set in stone or anything (it can be very subject dependent) - just something that careers guidance people tell applicants so that they have an idea of how to pick universities for their UCAS application and not choose ones all in the same league.

[PurplePotato]

Isthiscorrect, don't be worried. My DS's first choice is Cambridge, his second choice isn't a RG university at all, and then the others are a tier 1, tier 2 and tier 3 (Birmingham, which he loves). Like Bonsoir says, it depends hugely on the subject.

[Shootingatpigeons]

What careers guidance people? No good ones would spout a subjective list like that. This is one of those subjective lists that will vary according to who you are speaking to and where they went to university, you can split the pack any which way when it comes to subjective judgements. And you can't at all anticipate the subjective judgements of future employers which may date back to the 80s


The best thing to use is the various subject tables, and perhaps the International tables since these are an indication of international reputation, should your DD be thinking of a future abroad. What is best for each subject varies widely so overall ranking become all but irrelevant. The way DD and I are discussing it since it is complicated a bit by her being joint honours, is to look at the elements which make up the subject tables, weighted by student satisfaction, research rankings, employment prospects etc and consider all the factors for each university for both subjects. It is all a bit swings and roundabout for her top choices and actually Birmingham comes in near the top on all elements for one of her subjects but is below the top 20 for the other.

The important thing is to go visit, and get down to the nitty gritty of the modules on offer in the courses, how it is assessed etc. All these universities will have top academics carrying out world class research in particular areas. So is it an area you are really interested in? will you even ever get to see that academic? One of my friend DDs is at Oxford being taught by a very famous academic except she isn't being taught by him because he is always away being famous and she is left ill equipped to pass the exams compared to those in other colleges not much point getting to Oxford if you don't get a decent degree at the end. Meanwhile my DD1 is writing an essay on a topic one of the very famous academics spouts about regularly on Radio 4. He lectures first years but obviously there are 100+ but now third year she emailed him and he told her to drop by for a chat ........

[BeckAndCall]

bonsoir I think your explanation of second and third tier RG unis is a long way off the mark in that it is so dependent on subject plus I've never seen Manchester in the same grouping as Durham and Bristol. And kings very rarely gets mentioned in that second grouping either.

For example, if you want to be a barrister - then ox cam LSE Durham and Bristol are your top group; if its Maths you're talking Warwick, Cambridge and imperial; if its English then it's Oxford and York. If its engineering, don't forget Lancaster, who are not even RG!

My perception of the relative rankings generally comes from the RAE. - and all this will change with the REF next year in any case. And there are plenty of other people who would rank by other factors - graduate destinations for instance - a good grouping might be the top 5 universities for sending students straight onto KPMG and PwC graduate schemes.

So, there is no generally accepted second and third rankings of RG unis tbh. But there is a general perception of the top 2 at least. Some will argue top 3 , but they'd be scientists. Some will argue 4, but they'd be social scientists!
Interesting debate, though.....

[Shootingatpigeons]

Not to forget that RG is not in itself a guarantee of quality. It is a bunch of unis who got together to pool their collective resources to lobby, without any quality criteria determining membership, and somehow developed for themselves a brand. It is a brand that has more to do with perceptions of consumers than the actual product, since it encompasses courses and unis that spread quite widely in terms of league table positions and selectivity, and their comparability with non RG unis. Another group of arguably comparable unis formed another similar group and a few others didn't bother. Now since "1994" never took off as a brand some of the 1994 group defected to RG and the rest have taken their balls home again.....

So definitely wise to stick to the subject tables.........

[Bonsoir]

I don't think that these things are set in stone at all. But the reality is that Oxford, Cambridge and the London four (yes, King's included) are beginning to pull away significantly from the others in many ways, including their ability to attract the very best undergraduates. Hence other universities in the RG (ie that believe they can still compete with the best) adopting new strategies to attract the best undergraduates.