Dear Prof Chimney,
I would have posted last night, but did not want to put you in a position of feeling you might need to respond. Though it may not always appear so, I and others really value the information and insights provided by you and others with significant experience.
Having attempted the polite note (which I hope has improved my prospects of a 2.1) I would want to add a little.
In an earlier post on experience gained from last year I suggested parents/prospective students take a look at the ratio of applications to places. My sense they are rising quickly for top ranking Universities in some applied/vocational maths based subjects including economics and engineering, whilst they have always been high for law and medicine.
Warwick suggested they had had 2000 qualified candidates for about 350 places on their economics course. Numbers last year could have been even higher, as English skills across the EU improve and non UK EU students become more aware of the scope for studying outside their home country.
Somehow they have to choose, and also make sure they treat all candidates equally. (Not just UCAS requirements but European law).
Actual results are likely to be significantly higher than the standard offer, again something that shows up on UCAS statistics.
I assume, based on observation, that on receiving the application they do a quick triage. Yes, no and maybe. The yesses would be candidates who would be towards the top of the heap whatever. I assume here that already achieving your grades helps. DS received a quick yes from his fifth choice, most probably because he had a predicted A* in Further maths, plus it was a department that was aiming to expand its numbers. He then waited till the end of March to hear from choices 2, 3 & 4.
He got one of these. But not the other two. One of the others offered him a course in another faculty.
- Why did it take so long? LSE, who presumably have had complaints in the past, did their best to communicate, with a series of emails (all containing over optimistic deadlines, but hey) saying his application had been received, he met standards and it had been passed to the department etc. He was clearly in a maybe pile. The Student Room thread suggested he was far from alone. What seemed to be happening was that LSE needed to wait first till the application deadline in January, and then for some students (mature students or EU students with matriculations that did not differentiate sufficiently) to sit an additional written test. Then each week, as some applicants firmed and insured other Universities, thereby fine tuning their numbers, they winnowed the maybe pile by accepting some and rejecting some.
I assume then on the final day, with knowledge of the proportion of accepted students likely to drop out or not make their grades, faculty members sat in a darkened room, presumably with a bottle of gin and sorted the remaining applications based on very small differences in their paper applications. The numbers of application are so high that at this point it has to be pretty random.
- What causes one candidate to be successful and another not? Each University will have its own scoring system, but inevitably on the outside there is massive speculation.
What does the University think it is there for? International reputation and standing? Providing opportunity for the educationally disadvantaged? Providing wider education and learning in a collegiate/campus structure or tutoring the very bright and motivated in their subject? How do you balance a good application from a student who is top of the year at a bog-standard comp who clearly has not had the right advice on writing a PS, against a superbly educated son of a Parisian banker, or a seriously clever International student whose PS was professionally written.
(I know International students normally compete in a different pool but the University has to make budget decisions which have to balance the additional fees against the fact that a poorer EU candidate may need bursary support.)
Strands based on these small samples, suggest Cambridge likes really top mathematicians, and Warwick is impressed by good linguists. DS thinks that his decision to take an essay subject rather than a science as his fourth A level may have helped with LSE, even though his overall UMS average suffered, plus the fact that he had registered for and attended a number of LSE public lectures. But who knows.
I think we are happy to accept it is an honest process, though some parents clearly think that some Universities/departments are concerned about managing their UK private/state ratios, and indeed I hear that some private schools now actively steer students away from applying to some Departments. Oddly we know two very bright students who, apart from bursaries to private schools, should have scored lots of contextualised points who fared no better, indeed perhaps not as well, as their peers.
Another variant is that Oxbridge is worried that their international reputation means that they could fill places on more mathsy/vocational degrees with superb non-UK students but that they are keen to maintain a collegiate approach and so give weight to students who look as if they will engage fully in wider University life.
Again who knows. Or rather Chimney and others will know how individual Universities/Departments score. Students and their parents don't.
At an Alumni talk about where the LSE was headed, the Director of the LSE said they had got numbers badly wrong when higher fees were introduced. They had anticipated a higher drop out rate, which then did not happen. They had to live with it.
Sorry about the essay.
Kind regards etc