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?

On The Student Room there are often posts from foreign students wailing that Admissions won't understand their qualifications. Official Admissions will then come on and state that yes, they do. They are not going to pick up a French application and think, "WTF is Bacc? Reject!" In fact on the websites for all to see are the requirements for many countries. And if you are from, say, Western Samoa then I'm sure any email enquiry about equivalent grades would be welcomed.

If the question is why are, hypothetically, 19% of Dutch applicants successful and only 9% of French, then that's a reasonable avenue to explore. But all these admissions statistics are too multi-layered anyway to make much sense of.

I'm a bit baffled why this thread has spent so much time discussing applications by foreign students. The OP's DD is Welsh.

NeedMoreSleep - TSR is not a very good source of information for the very good reason that applicants try hard to trip their perceived competitors up by posting inaccurate information. I have witnessed some terrific examples!

tropicalfish - this thread is a terrific illustration of the emotional attachment by stakeholders to the purity of the Oxbridge brand.

Really? I'm not sure sure if my DD used TSR much, but I'd have hoped that anyone hoping to get into a good university would be capable of realising that some of the information there might not be accurate (whether deliberately or otherwise) and doing a bit of double checking. In the same way that MN threads can be very informative but also contain out of date information, myths or information which was correct in relation to their DC for a specific course but which doesn't necessarily apply to all.

Yes, if only we were all coolly rational like you, bobo.

What exactly would these 'stakeholders' get out of covering up a plot to exclude Etonians, do you imagine?

Ds swore that most of the posters were parents. Come the day of arrival of The Letter he wasn't wrong... lots of regular posters did the big reveal that they were in fact someone's mum.

I can't imagine many TSR posters deliberately try to throw competitors off the scent. I actually saw rather the opposite, with over-enthusiastic bigging up of each other and people assuring others they'd get a place.

LRD - you consistently rise to any suggestion of even the mildest raising of eyebrows. Presumably because your own personal brand is so dependent on an unsullied institutional brand?

I don't have anything as exciting as a personal brand, bobo. Though I do admire your consistently mercenary outlook.

I would imagine that there are a rather large number of people who've been involved in Oxbridge admissions, who could actually do rather well out of exposing wide scale corruption and dishonesty. Plenty of people work as interviewers knowing they'll not be working there shortly; plenty more must have a healthy expectation they'll not be working there in the future.

This is one of many reasons why it'd be quite hard to maintain an institution-wide cover-up.

Frankly, too, I can't see Oxford and Cambridge getting involved in mutually assured destruction on the scale your conspiracy theory would require.

It is not mercenary to expose those who are economical with the truth. At best, the term might be "whistleblowing", which, as we all know, is rarely well received .

You mention wide scale corruption and dishonesty? Do you have something to share? No one else has suggested anything of the sort. Or do you believe that admissions are (should be) entirely independent of budgets and their associated politics?

Well, I am but a poor oik with nary a piece of silver to my name, and no exploited French students to remunerate me, but since you ask, I shall share that of which no other has breathed a word.

I can conclusively reveal that certain anonymous sources have told me of an unwritten contract of mutual self-preservation, rooted in historic institutional loyalties between one of our notable public schools and two of our ancient universities, and involving major donors. The word 'suspect' has been used, and there were question marks of a most meaningful nature over it. A shocking thickening plot emerged, the details of which remain murky to all but the inside circle.

Of course, perhaps to you none of that sounds like wide scale corruption and dishonesty.

But then, clearly, it didn't sound like utter bollocks to you either, so there (as in so many things) we differ.

Well there you have it, LRD - brand loyalty can be a wonderful thing and it can also be very risky. You might like to review some 20 year old case studies of Marks & Spencer

M&S is in on it too!

The bastards!

Are they on the pro-Eton or the anti-Eton side?

You are endearingly loyal, LRD. Your employers must love you. I hope you are properly rewarded for your unswerving devotion

To derail this thread on international applications by talking about re-applying to Oxbridge, [cough] years ago when I went, I was one of five in my year in my subject. The other four had ALL applied to the Other Place the year before, been rejected, done gap years and re-applied successfully.

I was rather freaked out when I found this out. For various reasons, including economic, a gap year wouldn't have been feasible for me and I would have just gone elsewhere (and in those old fashioned days I had a clutch of offers with lower grades to pick from), and it made me feel that they were all far more ambitious and determined than me. They were all also privately-educated, more mature and had a lot of gap year talk to share.

Now I look back and do wonder slightly at how the admissions people went for all of them in one year!

That does sound unusual! But I think it can go both ways - you get year groups where one person has reapplied and feels the odd one out, too.

Which must be far more common, although of course across a year there'll be a fair few deferred entries.

The subject interviews were with a guy covering a year's sabbatical so we never saw him again. Maybe he was making some mischief?

I'm just imagining the daily fail trying to make sense of this thread 😀😀

I don't think the subject has much resonance with the DM's readership.

I'm lost on the conspiracies again . I do think what would be more helpful to a French applicant though , rather than weighing the pig a hundred ways, would be " Well I knew Henri and Mary who were both offered places and you seem similar in ability and aptitude and enthusiasm so it's worth a shot (or not as the case may be). "

Surely Fanny rather than Mary. DD once had an lovely French exchange called Fanny. Poor girl lots of sniggering.

Benchmarking would be fine, Basilisk, if there were enough Henri and Marie characters around to benchmark. All that is needed is for published statistics to be upfront about the share of French holders of the French bac applying and receiving offers versus the share of applicants from international schools with other qualifications.

The current statistics make Oxbridge undergraduates look far more diverse than they are in reality.

I am currently imagining the film version. It is going to be loads better than Brideshead or Morse because there will be loads of shots of the Eiffel Tower and plenty of camerawork lingering over extremely expensive handbags (sacs a main) The patina of polished silver in the background.

There will also be scenes with dons that are bit like Deep Throat in the car park (think All the Presidents' Men.) Someone like Charlotte Rampling as a posh French mother or grandmother. There may have to be corpses. Maybe Romeo and Juliet like heaps of them.

Believe me it is going to be seriously good!

I also think that there is no problem at all about giving very few offers to applicants from other countries who have no t been to international schools. The issue is not the tiny proportion of undergraduates but the lack of transparency in the admissions data (PR).

We have all got that you are a fact free literary zone, AnnaMagdalene