What universities are these GCSEs good enough for?

[lawlawlaw]

Hello all,

We are very happy with our dd who did very well (imo) at her gcses and couldnt be more thrilled or proud of her.
She really wants to study history at uni,
DH and I were wondering what sort of university are they good enough for?

Oh, almost forgot to add what she had lol! She got 6a* and 6a from a comp.

Thanks:-)

So, all you parents who have been through the process already, what is the level of GCSE results at which applying to Oxford or Cambridge is a waste of time?

Asking because my DD's results were marginally lower than the OP's daughter, but obtained at a state school in special measures. Also the sixth form she has moved to, whilst obtaining league table topping A levels, does not seem to translate that into many Oxbridge places.

Even if you have very good grades there are so many children with them no one from any school private or state should assume Oxbridge will be a dead cert. Robustness to try things and fail is as important in life as always getting ticks and stars.

In the more academic schools there will be a good few chidlren with 11 A and certainly my children with As and A would have been unlikely to get into Oxbridge had they tried. However the Tinkly child in the special measure school might get some kind of contextual offer - look at subject on a website for particularly universities and I think they give the average offer made and also the average contextual offer.

tinky I think you are in the same boat that we were with DD. She attended a failing school obtained 4A*5A 1B. She did extremely well on her TSA Oxford test which she had to do for her course. I think that over rid the GCSE she got to some extent. DD gcse are a bit substandard for say if she had gone to a select independent. She did very well on her AS too, high ums so that was a plus. Please do try and apply if your DS feels he/she will thrive at Oxbridge, aspirational application. We was encouraged not to by the school who have very little experience with Oxbridge application so ended up doing alot of research and homework ourselves.

Shegot: Course work ( CAs, ISAs etc) were a very easy way to bank marks for my DD

Yes, well they aren't dyspraxic are they. DD1 sustained an injury during one of her ISAs which not only had a negative impact on that ISA, but also on other a couple of CAs that had to be postphoned as a result (the injury meant that not only could she not write she couldn't type either). I am very glad that DD2 won't be required to conduct experiments where it actually MATTERS if she drops something, hurts herself etc. DS on the other hand finds CAs and ISAs much easier to do (and cope with) than 'real' exams.

DD1 was fine with written CAs in the main but they were still more challenging for her than the 1 -2 hour written exams were, and disproportionately more challenging than they were for NT kids. I know the world can't be designed for kids with SpLDs but my point is that different kids find different things easy or hard, even NT ones.

DD has definitely not had the broad off curriculum experience to date, that DS has had.

But surely some of that is down to her not going to Westminster? You pays your money, you takes your choice. I do not believe for one moment that if the kids at Westminster did GCSEs instead of IGCSEs they would suddenly stop getting the broad off curriculum esperience that the customers are paying for.

I do toally agree that some CAs are clearly easier for most kids than exams are (French, I'm looking at you). Some require a level of organisation and commitment that some kids find difficult to maintain for the duration (is this not one of the reasons why boys' results have not been as good as girls' in recent years?).

Personally I would have hated CAs and would probably have had a nervous breakdown long before I took my actual O level exams had we had CAs as well. Having said that CAs mirror life as I live it now better than terminal exams do. And I just about cope with the neverending death march of deadlines, I suppose. So maybe I'd have coped. I'm glad I didn't have to do them though.

The debate about the relative merits of GCSEs versus iGCSEs is not really worth having. In the big scheme of things whether you do GCSE or iGCSE will not make a scrap of difference to your life.

Cheers mayfly.

Three of my DSs were decidedly disadvantaged by CAs, which tend to favour girls not boys. Science teachers in particular seem to loathe them - they take up far, far too much teaching time, which is a handicap in itself.

Good point Bobo. I agree, that's why I said it upthread :)

If stuff outside school is still considered important and museums usually only take those of 18+ for work/ volunteering there are various opportunities with The National Trust and maybe you have a local archaeological society?

Uhtred I couldn't agree more about coursework - I would have been a disaster. And I still am a disaster at rolling deadlines (I tried to cram a year's worth of MA dissertation work into a couple of months - super stress).

And selfishly I'm pleased my DCs haven't had to do too much of it either, as the stress of helping them keep focused over a period of time would have been at least as hard as helping them work towards an exam.

Tinkly I'm new to all this Oxbridge application stuff as a parent, but as far as I can see, GCSEs are not the be all and end all as an indicator of Oxbridge application success. If they were (stealth boast approaching) DS who got more A*s than anyone mentioned on this thread so far (I think), would be a shoo-in. As it is, they are only one factor that will be taken into account when he applies - and I'm worried about how he will perform at an interview and what they will think of the essays he submits, given his context of educational advantage.

So if your DC is interested in applying, they should go for it.

Thanks to everyone who replied. I have looked at some of the links Janet suggested and discovered that, although DD's school was shite, our naice postcode means she will not qualify for the requisite two flags that would make her eligible for a contextual offer.

However, I have also discovered that the subject DD is keen on is relatively uncompetitive, in terms of ratio of applications to acceptances. So, if she's keen, and AS's are good, I might suggest she gives it a punt.

bobo I agree that it will probably make no difference in the long run.

But it does make a difference to day to day experience in years 10 and 11. That said, if is been greatly bothered, I'd have moved DD. But I wasn't so I didn't.

uhtred some of it was to do with one school being W and one not ( in terms of pitch and tone ). But some of it was due to time and space. With CAs etc, there was far less give in DDs timetable IYSWIM.

LadyPeterWimsey I don't actually help my kids. Or rather, I help them by being as dissociated as possible from what they are doing and thus insulating them from both my stressiness and my impatience. And also my cynical attitude. I know they observe the effects of my lastminute.com attitude to life and work every day though. Or at least hear my mournful keening 'fuck fuck fuckitty fuck' outbbursts as I try and write two papers and a slideset on a Sunday. One would hope it would be a salutary lesson but...it appears possibly not. They are all last minute merchants too. The only one who has shown any signs of learning from my mistakes (in precisely the way that I don't) is DD1. Bless her.

I too am exceedingly concerned about how DD1 will sell herself (or fail to) in interviews (she has AS as well as SpLDs and it's completely in the lap of the gods as to how she presents herself in person with strangers). If she could do it all in writing she'd be fine (or at least, she wouldn't be at a disadvantage due to issues divroced from her ability and potential. she might of course just not be good enough but that's the same for everyone). But she can't. So maybe she won't be. This is the moment in a sentence where I'd normally say tant pis but I find myself unable to toughen up when it's my own DD. :(

Yes, I understand that. What I meant and should have made clearer is that there shouldn't be rivalry and competition between DC/parents over the relative merits of eg a B at GCSE English lit versus iGCSE English lit as the difference is non-existent in the big scheme of life.

bobo I don't suppose there much real competition in real life.

The essence of MN is to analyse the minutiae but I doubt that's indicative of real convetsations?

Since, as someone said up thread, these decisions are presented to us as a done deal. There's not much point is there? The only choice either of mine have had in this is MFL for DD. The school runs both. Those who might like to continue post 16 are encouraged to take IGCSE but they don't have to.

Some don't. DD did.

And isn't it funny joe little it all matters so shortly afterwards?

All that blood sweat and tears and now - poof - on to the next stage.

How little - autocorrect

Uhtred I'm afraid my 'help' is along those lines too. I do a special kind of sigh and eye roll when they 'remember' they have homework late on Sunday night, and a fine line in nagging when they are on exam leave and find themselves at the fridge every two minutes 'taking a break' and apart from the proofreading that's about the extent of it. Like you, I have one who likes to get things done in good time, and I do occasionally wonder if he was swapped at birth, he is so unlike the rest of us.

I feel for your DD and the worry about her showing their potential. I worry far more about my DC's university applications than I ever did about my own, when in reality, the effort should have all gone the other way if you think about my ability to influence the result...

tinky whilst DS1 had a lot of As at GCSEs relatively few were A*s - certainly far fewer than the OP's DC. AS were a different matter, so maybe for him at least, the trajectory argument had some validity. His Cambridge application was successful, and for a competitive subject in a competitive "but I liked the architecture" college. 4 other offers as well, includinng Durham, all of whom whilst seeing the AS grades would not have seen the UMS.

Worth also remembering that there are in reality less than 150 schools (state & independent) that make it into double figures for successful Oxbridge applications. So whilst your DD's sixth form may not rival the likes of Westminster, Magdalen College School, North London Collegiate, St Paul's etc even if it is getting just a handful in each year it is outperforming a huge swathe of schools across the country

Boys hmm that is interesting. In that case I suspect I may have been a bit harsh about how DD's sixth form handles the Oxbridge application process.

I have googled. this year they had:
900 A level candidates
180 with at least 3 As
17 successfull Oxbridge places

So roughly 10% of possible applicants got a place I suppose. Does that sound reasonable?

Actually, I've just compared this with Westminster school. They got 76 kids into Oxbridge out of about 180 candidates with the right sort of grades.

So pretty shit then. I am actually really annoyed by those statistics.

Ah, I am interested in the postcode issue above. The whole scheme of contexual offers is fraught with unfairness. The mother who works 4 jobs 7 days a week to pay £10k a year private school fees who lives in an awful council house and never did A levels finds her child disadvantaged. Someone like I am whose parents sent them to a private school where hardly anyone went to university at all and got the best results in the school is disadvantaged. Someone whose child wins a full bursary to a leading boarding school is disadvantaged. However I do accept that the old rather informal system of univesrity admissions people that someone who got by far the best results in a school which rarely does well is woth giving a bit of extra credit to.

Anyway if the subject is a bit easier to get into (my daughter did ancient history at Bristol and is now a City lawyer and probably found that easier to get into rather than law here) then it can help unless you are so good you are going to get in anywhere you apply to. Tactical applications help. My brother applied and got into Cambridge to read medicine in part by applying to a college which had just started taking girls and was not too popular etc etc.

Hard to know if that 10% is fair. My daughter's old school gets about 40 Oxbridge places a year but it's one of the most selective independents and in the SE. Not sure of the size of year group to work out a %.

tinkly Westminster is the ultimate outlier, no other school comes close to them in terms of Oxbridge success, Eton & Winchester for example both in the low 30s in percentage terms - although that is still top 10 in the country.

Around 90 schools have a 10% or higher cohort success rate - based on the complete 2013 cycle data. Just 90 schools. Only one of those schools was not either an indie or a grammar school.

The likes of Hills Road is getting around 6.5%, Peter Symonds 3.2%, Loreto Manchester 1.9%. So 17/900 at your DD's sixth form - 1.9% - is actually not bad going at all for a presumably non truly selective 6th Form. In cohort terms for 2013 at least there were only around 200 state schools (excluding grammars) that would have done better. With only a couple of dozen getting past 5%.

At DD old state school I think it has become even grimmer since she left 2 years ago, just had a look at the statistic for 6th form A level, I think government insist now that the data published is A levels from ebacc subjects. Out of 82 students only 4 got A*-B!!! And we are in the best state school within 10mile radius. When DD was there the percentage was alot better better as data included subjects like product design and ICT. But take away those soft subjects and only use only facilitating ones its rather shite. I wish their wasn't such a lottery with the quality of education dependant on where you live.