Take a gap year and reapply to Oxbridge?

[tyngedyriaith]

DD has been rejected from Cambridge. People with far worse grades have gotten in. She's disappointed. She mentioned retrying next year if she exceeds the standard offer?

Is it worth it considering Welsh fees are going up next year?

Economics guy says they don't care about predicted grades and I doubt his college or subject are unique, so that may well not be an issue. I suspect you're making issues where there are none.

No, because universities regularly get back to applicants to double check predicted grades and references.

Remember - French applicants have nothing but grade predictions (no GCSEs) to be judged on.

I've just looked at the 2015 stats and can't see that France has a particular problem.

The statistics are incredibly misleading (not transparent at all).

Maybe someone's been censuring them.

I've taken every year and crossed with other statistics/knowledge of individual schools to get a picture of which exams (bac, OIB, IB, A-levels...) were successful.

So Bob, talk me through how the reader of the stats is being misled. France, Germany, Spain - almost all EU countries appear to be much of a muchness.

Well, I think as Orlanda and others have said , and as Ds said to me re having spoken to his friends making 2nd applications, the obvious things are 1) Was there something (either because you knew it or by feedback) which obviously went wrong in your first application which you can see a way you can fix , 2) Do you have the appetite to apply again and will you do something with the extra year which will make you think that it was not a wasted year even if the 2nd application does not work 3) Will you be able to dust yourself off and go somewhere else quite happily even if the 2nd application does not work. He also said that after reflection after the initial disappointment a number of his friends just got on with their other very good offers and have not looked back. I am only repeating what other posters have said , I know.

Say there were 200 applications from France, 50 offers and 40 acceptances. If you, goodbyestranger, were a French applicant at a French school, what would those statistics tell you about your chances of being offered a place?

I did Oxbridge uni admissions this year in my subject, as I've done for the last 10 years or so. Ordinarily I would have admitted all the Etonians who came my way, due to the unwritten contract of mutual self-preservation that exists between my institution and Eton, but not this year! I was so frightfully miffed at those old Etonians, Boris and Dave, for engineering Brexit, that I swore all Etonian candidates would be personae non gratae.

Only joking, sorry, I couldn't resist!

Oh My God, "Bob", that is hilarious!!!!

I don't quite get it why someone would take your advice on university admission in the UK, "Bob"? I mean you schooled outside UK from age 11 or 12? Then went to, was it Bristol Poly? And have not, certainly in the past, what, 12 years, worked at all, never mind in education? So why would someone ask your advice on admission to a Brit college? And why would you think you know more than someone who is clearly involved in the whole admissions shebang for Oxford or Cambridge?

open - I do like the idea that, in fantasy world, admissions officers would absolutely go in for anti-Etonian Brexit revenge, but would never desist from phrases such as personae non gratae.

Actually, I have been watching Lewis back-to-back with my pregnant DP who can't get off the sofa. The latest episode features the headmaster out of History Boys, moonlighting as an ex-con who'd faked his way into a readership and then a professorship in Ancient Greek, because Oxford were too snootily stuffy to check his references.

I suppose if you believe that's plausible, you might believe the cloak-and-dagger on this thread, too.

at lrd. The Lewis binge sounds fun. I should watch more Lewis!

Seriously though, sometimes I think people perceive Oxbridge admissions as more monolithic than it actually is. There are loads of different tutors interviewing at loads of different colleges. Many of them are parents themselves, and their children attend a whole spectrum of schools, from state schools in special measures (yes, really) to Eton. The idea that the institution as a whole would have a single unified attitude toward a school is absurd, as you say.

And by the way, I have seen it happen many times that one tutor thinks a candidate is great and wants to admit him/her, but the other tutor involved has had a different impression of the candidate, and wants to offer the place to someone else instead. When this happens we always try to make sure that the candidate is seen at other colleges, in order to maximise his/her chances of getting a place, but a candidate like this may or may not end up getting an offer. It's not a science. Lots of negotiation and compromise go on behind the scenes, especially when candidates are applying to joint schools at Oxford and the like.

Bobo - is your point that 1) UK universities don't take enough time to understand the system by which French students (by which I mean French students studying at school in France at time of application , not abroad ) are working under , or that 2) French schools do not take the time / effort / have the inclination to help those of their students to apply to UK universities (should those students choose to) ?

I realise that I have not only wandered off the OP's piste but am now running for the conversational hills.

LRD , I was a bit poorly recently and got under a blanket with the dogs on the sofa with Lewis / Hathaway / Morse - lovely !

YY, it's lovely escapism. Students all wear gowns, all teaching happens in gorgeous wood-panelled rooms, and everyone quotes meaningfully from Great Literature.

open - that makes sense (the non-monolithic bit). It's candidates too, I think? There's no way you can realistically have the same conversation with every single person, even if you standardise questions. As soon as they step into the room there are a zillion tiny things changing how they respond, even if it's just as simple as that they subconsciously prepared for elderly white men and found something different. So one interviewer might get one experience, and another something completely different.

Ha ha - how many fewer parents would want their DCs to go to Oxford if they realised that fact eleventy billion people get murdered every day

I've seen it - every other person gets murdered in Oxford - sorry OP and others. Thank heavens there isn't the University of Midsomer. Good luck to pregnant Dp and you LRD inter alia. B.

One thing I would say from my DS's point of view, is that he said he had tutors who did his admission interviews (Oxford) who, he felt, set him at his ease. He was nervous , obviously. They did not pull punches in the questions, but he thought he came out not being like a rabbit in headlamps because the people who interviewed him were nice when he walked in and sat down, and that helped him stay calm, say what he wanted to say etc. From those who do admissions - does that sound sensible or am I being naive ? He's still there and doing OK btw. I am not suggesting he needs his hand holding.

Thanks. Fortunately I am only risking the rather lower mortality rates (and crapper TV) of Grantchester, so I should be ok.

Do you mean, are you being naive to ask if your DS came across as calm, or to ask if they were nice and helped him stay calm?

If the latter, then, they train interviewers and they make a huge point of discussing how best to set the best conditions, to recognise someone getting nervous, and to keep things calm. Why not? It's not a test to see who's the calmest under pressure, just to see how they think.

Plus it's actually very hard watching someone being nervous in front of you, without wanting to do everything you sensibly can to put them at east!

This thread turned out to be unexpectedly hilarious! We've been having a Lewis binge recently so were pleased DD had applied to t'other one - apart from the murder rate, a high proportion of Oxford academics are barking! driven mad by the admissions process I suppose.

I rather like Grantchester - not least of which it stops us (me) shouting at the TV as to where you can park your car rather than your bicycle (although I do not have a DC at Cambridge) but no - Morse , you cannot just sling your Jag outside the Randolph & Endeavour the way from the airport to Catz is not down Turl St. That said I used to, some years ago, live near Albert Bridge and if film / tv are to believed it is the absolute conduit between any two places in London.

Yes, I wondered whether he had just lucked out in having nice interviewers - no surprise in the training. Some threads do end up being funny - (no disrespect to OP and others) .

this thread is amusing - but also pretty horrifying when you know who runs the country. If the OP's child had been rejected from Oxford they'd probably now be thinking thank God and definitely dont reapply. However not all Oxford graduates are like this and I can reassure the OP that my child and their friends who are/were at Cambridge arent like this either.

Bobo if you feel there is an issue with Cambridge, as well as Oxford, then this is something to discuss elsewhere. The admission exams are intended to provide a level playing field between candidates. If they are not doing so then take it up with e.g those tutors from Cambridge who have posted on the Student Room forum. I dont know if any have been on there this year but I doubt if the "old" ones would object to being contacted.

It did occur to me after reading this thread last night to wonder how much the newly-introduced tests at Cambridge this year (not sure about Oxford) in at least some subjects, combined with fewer AS results to assess, might have contributed to changes in some schools' success rate?

That, combined with the stated aim of widening access, seems far more plausible than the idea of a conspiracy involving hundreds of people with disparate political opinions and allegedly rather prone to thinking independently for themselves.

Woman I know, after her dd being rejected by Oxford, stated quite seriously that they would never watch another Morse/Lewis. Actually I do wonder when they film it. At 3am? Where is everybody?

Re French applicants' apparent lack of success - there are masses more foreign students applying now (as there are home students). I should think the French students' success/failure rate matches that of other countries. There are not unlimited places.

Where there is a bit of a conspiracy by all accounts is at universities with no interview. Dn reported that at her top RG university there were a large number of foreign students - well, to be blunt, Chinese - whose written and spoken language skills were dire and couldn't possibly follow the course. Perhaps links in to the apparent large-scale purchasing of dissertations and essays recently reported in press. Surely the Oxbridge system of interviewing candidates ensures that at least they're not just taking paying guests.

In most university departments the highest density of research calibre plus funding is at Oxbridge. These two universities attract most excellent academics at some point in their postgraduate career.

I know this was much earlier in the thread, but can you provide actual evidence for this in STEM subjects?

Oxbridge is in a number of ways less appealing than other top UK universities in my own subject. (However, I personally don't want to live in London, where the other top UK universities are for this subject.) I strongly suspect that this comment comes from somebody who is not in STEM, and whose discipline does not attract large fractions of international researchers. From outside the UK, London universities often seem far more appealing than Oxbridge and this is very relevant when many of the people hired for permanent positions are from abroad. The density of researchers in my own field across London is arguably the highest in the world.