Exeter offers : incompetent or arrogant?

[TalkinPeace]

DD submitted her form last October
Exeter have still not had the courtesy to send an offer (the other four Unis all have)
when phoned they said

• no offers have been issued (bollocks as DDs friends have theirs)
  
• offers will be made by end of December (bollocks as its now late march)
  
• offers will be made right after the UCAS cut off date (bollocks as it was in January)
  
• offers will be made by the end of March ........
  

Exeter are arrogant liars
the word needs to go round

[BitchyComment]

OurBlanche
Oops, I misread your post. Sorry. At least it's nice and clear for anyone else now

[OurBlanche]

[NiceCardigan]

LittlehamHums DS's offer last year from Exeter was above the range quoted in the prospectus. I'm not sure what the logic behind it was as they sent an email afterwards saying they would lower it to A*AA if he put them first.

[OurBlanche]

Really? I can honestly say that I have never heard of either of those 2 things happening.

They can't increase the grades for an offer, what they publish must be the offer they make and they get nothing out of lowering one, no one single student is worth that much, based on grades alone. They do make reduced offers under very specific circumstances, like sporting excellence, but not just cos they fancy it!

And you don't rank your choices, so there is no 'putting them first'.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

I think NiceCardigan means if her son had made Exeter his firm offer they would have reduced the grades a bit. Along the lines of other universities offering an unconditional offer to a pre-A level candidate if they firm the offer.

[LittlehamHums]

I thought I remembered something like that NiceCardigan. It was for an arts subject wasn't it? Lots of other people got the same offer. Hope it doesn't happen again. It was probably a way of trying to get top candidates to put them as firm.

(I think NiceCardigan meant putting them as Firm choice)

[titchy]

Ourblanche - offers in prospectuses are only ever indicative. It's not that unusual for actual offers to be lower, in a year of lower than expected applicants, or higher in a year of far more applicants than expected.

[BitchyComment]

I've cut and pasted Exeter Unis Info on 'offers'

Our ‘Typical Offer’, including any grades in specific subjects, is shown in the Entry Requirements tab in the individual programme pages. Whilst the majority of offers will normally be made within the publicised typical grade range, the University reserves the right to make offers above or below the publicised typical offer range for reasons of merit or due to competition for places. Our offers are normally expressed in terms of GCE A level grades or International Baccalaureate (IB) points.

It's a bit but at least it's there in black and white.

[OurBlanche]

titchy yes, they can always lower them, but they can't increase them without good reason... so, as Bitchy has posted, over subscription could increase offers, as they cream off the top achievers. But they can't do it 'just because'. This is becoming a little more prevalent with the fees, but is still only done after all else is considered - imagine how much money they lose with all those students who, in any other year, would have been offered a place.

So that leaves OPs DD either 'not quite' or one of very many in the same boat. Again, Exeter are not being arrogant or incompetent.

[OurBlanche]

I have just seen my self contradiction... I did mean that no single student would have an offer increased as some sort of threat/inducement.

Sorry

[boys3]

nice Actual grades achieved (A levels) for those doing English Lit at Exeter (for the 14/15 entry cycle) were:

A A A or better 19.5%

A* AA 22%

A A B 3%

AAA / AAB 24.5%

AAB 19%

ABB 4.5%

A^AC 2%

ABC / ABD / AAD 1.5%

Less than BBB 4%

makes one wonder as to the ;logic of their A A A offer policy

[OurBlanche]

The logic will be perceived kudos on getting an offer.

It was an obvious move once the fees were introduced. The government were warned that grades would be used as a marketing tool, that all HEs, from ex poly on up, would charge the maximum etc. And Lo!

[NiceCardigan]

Yes it was for English literature last year and I meant they would lower the offer if it was firmed. I presume it didn't happen again this year as I wasn't aware of any fuss although now that DS is at university it might have passed me by. I think they did increase the offer as some sort of strategy not to be an insurance choice and gave some sort of guff about wanting students to carry on working to their capabilities as the reason.

[maybebabybee]

Jesus wept.

Could you be overthinking this more?! Chill out.

[Coffeewith1sugar]

I had a Google on how to get data on A levels achieved on degree courses sounds really interesting to find out . So found a app, bestCourse4Me wow it does give you lots of interesting info?? Can see achieved A levels and subjects they took on degree courses at UK uni but is for 2013/14 cycle. It's a real eye opener on some courses

[Coffeewith1sugar]

But I don't know how boys3 manage to get percentages as so far with what I can see on this app the A*-E representation is shown as a blue line on each grade but doesn't say the %. But can still gage on average cohorts achievements.

[bojorojo]

Referring to an earlier comment my DD was told at her interview at Brighton, "You would have known that if you had come to our open day". Oh yes, they know! This, despite the fact that the talks and info were on You Tube specifically for students who could not attend. The answer to the question was not on You Tube. They said they understood not all prospective students could come to open days in the prospectus. The interviewer made that comment to DD when she was asked if she had any questions!

They also referred to the fact she was an A level candidate applying for an Art course, and had not done a Foundation course. The prospectus said they welcomed A level candidates. The interviewer said they did not . Why interview her then? She presumably was chosen in the strength of her previously submitted portfolio. Utterly bizarre. At some universities, the person interviewing is a law unto themselves! Forget the prospectus!

[boys3]

coco Economics were:

A A A or better 10.2%

A* AA 29.6%

A A B 1%

AAA / AAB 35.7%

AAB 17.3%

ABB 1.0% (the 4.5% on the English was ABB also not ABB - my typo error)

ABB 2.0%

ABC 1.0%

Less than BBB 2%

found this is in an Exeter response to an FOI request www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/admission_statistics_for_l100_an#incoming-607797 The requestor asked for English & Economics data. The figures above are taken from Exeter's excel file provided as part of the FOI response, although given the date I think both sets of figures relate to DCs starting the course at Exeter in the uni's 14/15 academic year, and are therefore the 2014 exam results profile. The actual data set provided does contain two years worth of data for both degree subjects and shows quite a variance between the two years in the % gaining AAA or higher

[boys3]

the delights of a wet bank holiday afternoon :)

[BitchyComment]

FOI requests make for fascinating reading. They must be a pain in the butt for the Unis though. . There are some interesting ones requesting info for Oxford and Rustification stats.

[disquit2]

Referring to an earlier comment my DD was told at her interview at Brighton, "You would have known that if you had come to our open day". Oh yes, they know!

But you are referring to a course which interviews. The vast majority of courses don't. Courses which have 1500-2000 applications for 200 places couldn't possibly keep track of who came to open days. In addition, it would be directly discriminatory against those who just couldn't afford the travel costs.

FOI requests make for fascinating reading. They must be a pain in the butt for the Unis though.

I don't think universities particularly care, provided that the data doesn't enter into league tables used by most prospective students. It is deliberate that unistats and league tables list the average points rather than the best 3 A2 grades, to obscure what grades they actually take.

On the other hand, too much information is not necessarily a good thing, unless you know how to interpret it. Universities such as Durham have entry tariffs inflated by the high proportion of students that come from selective (mostly private) schools. This does not in itself mean that their courses are actually "harder" or "better" than courses at universities which take far more students from state schools and have lower entry tariffs. (For my own subject Durham doesn't make the top ten for its course imo.)

Looking at the tables above, I don't know exactly how to interpret them without further information (and I am an academic). Clearly Exeter were not enforcing A stars for English, despite their strange 2 A star offers the following year, but what proportion of those entrants were in any case given contextual offers because of their backgrounds? AAB from one school might well be viewed as an equivalent offer to an A star and 2As from a selective/private school. Getting AAB or lower doesn't necessarily mean that the student will be worse or unable to keep up with the A star students either.

I would want to see how entrance grades on any given course are correlated with demographics and degree results before reading too much into them. At my own university many of the high firsts actually come from students who came in with entrance grades in the lower quartile.

I guess one might try to infer from the above by how much you could miss an offer and still be accepted, but this may well also depend on context (school etc).

[MedSchoolRat]

"You would have known that if you had come to our open day". Oh yes, they know!

I wouldn't know :). I have no idea what my dept or Uni does on Open days. We get a lot of instruction emails about parking on Open days.

Because UCAS points appear on the University league tables, I suspect they drive admission offers more than anything else.

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

Maybe I am being absurdly pollyanna, but isn't 'you would have known if you'd come to our open day' just, you know, a comment? If you'd replied 'oh, we did come', isn't it possible they'd have said 'oops, ok then, the answer is ....'?

I may be wrong, but my impression - based on two universities at a very low level, so I am sure it's not saying much - is that it's just vanishingly unlikely the same people are involved at all the different levels people mention, with this level of cross-checking.

I'd have thought that there will be several groups:

• the people who do open days, many of whom will be students/ postgrad volunteers as well as employees, and academics doing this because they want to meet prospective students they might get to teach.
  

• the people who keep records of open days, who will meet and speak to a small minority of visitors on that day.
  

• People who vet applications. Some of these will be academics who really don't have a vested interest in who gets a place, because they won't be teaching that course, and others who will only care about teaching.
  

• the people who respond to emails/phone calls to admissions
  

I would think the overlap between those groups must be tiny!