Applying for Uni 2019 entry Part 2, UCAS & offers

[Decorhate]

Here we go!

I absolutely agree with you Piggy - the system is institutionally biased against less advantaged schools & pupils.

TheFrendo it’s a nice idea but it would make for an odd employment situation though - pretty much the whole country’s 18 year old population seeking employment just between June and December. Often in the service sector (where a lot of those jobs would be) summer holidays, September, and November are very quiet months. Companies would be unlikely to want to hire for that period and it’d just be massively competitive!

Dd was predicted BBC but I saw at parents evening that another student had been predicted a grade above her even though she had got significantly less than dd in the mock. I queried it and it turned out her target grade was higher due to gcse results!!
I was quite 😡
Anyway, DD has a range of offers from BCC up to AAB from those predicted grades.
It all seems vastly unfair to me.

Thsi is silly : a target grade is a target grade. it just shows what an average student with the same GCSE profile might get, with huge margins of variation. So many teachers view these as some kind of crystal ball. I have this argument so many times at my own school. They develop such fixed expectations . They are harmful.

Plus , my entire A Level class has the same 'target grade' with VERY different abilities in the actual subject. Grr

DS's target grades are lower than most of his cohort because he didn't do as well in his GCSEs as he should have done. So there has been a mismatch all the way through Years 12 and 13 twixt the TG and PG based on sixth form work and exam results.

Son e mailed three unis for a look see. Loughborough, Manchester and Nottingham.

Loughborough invited him as did Manchester and Nottingham. He told one of them he could come. One he was working in the pub five hour shift and the other it was too short notice. He only told me this tonight after the event.

I just want to cry....

Emailed three unis for what madmum? If he hasn’t had the chance to look around them all it’s not the end of the world - there are post offer holder days at most and so much info online these days

Unis really don't judge the accuracy of predicted grades from particular schools, sorry.

If an admission officer has 1000 applications to look through - a fairly average number - they really won't have the time. Most take a pretty formulaic approach.

Another one with target grades not in sync with predictions as his GCSE grades were not what you would expect for students with the predictions he has. It makes me feel a bit unsure about how accurate predictions are....

Had an e-mail from school today apparently a large number of pupils need to complete their applications in the next two weeks. If not they cannot guarantee they will be in time for 15th January. Because of the xmas break.

I honestly do not know whether it is all the parents fault. This is the first e mail the school have sent since year 12. The children have had discussions in registration once a week and opportunities to speak to UCAS representative three times a week.

I suspect some parents are going to be blowing a gasket when they see this e-mail tonight.

I do think it would have been sensible of the school to send an e mail more recently than year 12. I picked a pile of pupils up from the cinema last week and asked which open days they had been to, none I was blithely told. One of them is the Head Girl (I give up)

I picked a pile of pupils up from the cinema last week and asked which open days they had been to, none I was blithely told. One of them is the Head Girl (I give up)

Some people - students and parents - hold the opinion that open days are just a frsntuc marketing ploy, you can't get any more from them than you can from looking on the internet etc and there's no need to visit before the offer holder day stage. And hope that you are left with enough options, between possibly not getting a full hand of offers in the first place and setting foot on campus for the first time and realising that you've made a colossal mistake putting that one on your UCAS form.

Dd says she can't imagine having applied to any universities without having visited them first.

Dd hasn't been to any open days. She decided which unis/courses she wanted to apply for by reading the prospectuses, looking at modules offered, league tables, NSS, facilities offered, YouTube tour videos, etc.

She reckoned that the actual town/campus wouldn't put her off a good course. Also she didn't see the point of a 6-7 hour round trip to view a university she might not get an offer from and then it would have been a wasted day.

So she's applied for her 5 and is seeing the campuses either if she gets called for an interview or on offer holder days in the Spring. Then she can make her firm and insurance choices following those.

Seems sensible to me.

I don't know about open days. I had only been to one of mine before I applied, and it was unusual to visit many more. I think most of my friends hadn't been to any, and it's much easier to get info now.
However most of mine offered an interview, whereas (other than subjects like medicine) I don't think they do.

However dd1's been round about 6 or 7 and applied to 4 currently (still thinking about the 5th). She was unusual in that she's been on her own (or with Student Room friends) whereas most seem to have gone with parents.

But she's thorough and likes to know what she's getting into. I suspect dd2 and ds will be much more stick a pin in the map and apply there whether they've heard of it or not.

DS applied to Sheffield without visiting , I think mainly because his friend is going there! Anyway he went for the interview and absolutely loved the city, the lecturers and the other applicants. Felt that he really fitted in and that it was "Home".
He still has 2 more interviews to go but at the moment Sheffield is way ahead.

madmum obviously the school haven’t been communicating well enough with students the importance of meeting various deadlines, which is frustrating - but at the end of the day they’re 17/18. It shouldn’t be all down to parents and teachers to do everything for them!! Lots of parents simply won’t know enough about the system to help, and a good number more just won’t be that interested in uni applications. It sounds like a year out might be good for a lot of those who aren’t successfully working towards the deadline.

I didn’t know which unis DD was looking at unless she brought them up to me! And the open days she went to were not the places she applied in the end (she looked at Oxford and Warwick in one trip, and at Nottingham). She knew she wasn’t applying in year 13 though so is lucky enough to have been able to visit all the unis she’s applied to by visiting friends there!! It gives her a real feel of what the unis are actually like rather than the artificial nature of the open days.

It’s interesting to see different strategies here! After Dd’s research, we visited 4 universities and she put down her 2 favourites on her UCAS form as she’s discounted everything else. She’s now got 2 offers with the same grades so she’ll go to the ‘offer open days’ to decide which to firm. I believe we can still put the other one down as an insurance. I would have thought this gives her the best chance if she drops a grade from their offers as there are two chances she will still be taken by them. She’s predicted AAA (which is realistic) and the offers are ABB. She would have liked an unconditional just to take the pressure off but I think she’s in a nice position.

My DS started uni this year, he visited 4 of his 5 choices for open days. He was immediately put off one of his favourites from the visit, he didn't like the department, the students kept saying the course was overly stressful and the accommodation wasn't quite what he was expecting. Without this visit he may have put it as firm or insurance. For him the visits were really important, you get a feel for a place, he put Sheffield as his first choice as it was very welcoming open day and the department had a vibrancy about it. He was over the moon when he got the grades and is loving it there.

Marmie - that is interesting. DS is applying for medicine and visiting the open days did not affect the 4 choices, but it did affect the ranking. Sheffield moved from "OK, we can see it" to top choice other than Cambridge, which he would love but does not really expect to get. Also, if you are going to an interview, it helps to have been to the open day, both for getting bearings and for having things to say about the course and university. So it was worth doing for us.

Sheffield was the very last Open Day we went to, almost a last resort. And ds loved it and it will be at the least his insurance.

I think we did 10 in total... two which are really popular for his subject he hated. So definitely worth the trip to find that out

madmum5811 - I'd say it's not the parents fault. Students who are 17/18 and bright enough to go to uni, should be on top of this themselves assuming the school are giving them support.

DD has spent hours in the holidays trawling through university websites. She started off the uni visiting herself with a friend by going to LSE (two hours away), which confirmed she didn't want a London uni. Also, our local one - the course wasn't right and the uni being quite small didn't offer her much socially.

We then got onboard and have taken her to two open days and also visited St Andrews and Edinburgh unis as they're a long way from home and I wanted her to have some idea of what journey involved and where she'd be based. The only one she hasn't visited is Durham.

Regarding the application, all we've done is comment on her PS. On top of the school supporting her with this, she's also taken it to two relevant teachers for the types of course she's interested in to comment.

Without this visit he may have put it as firm or insurance.

Unless we were the other side of the world, even if DD (or DS1 before her) had insisted on not attending open days, we would have done a bit of foot putting down and insisting that anywhere that offered a place was visited for the offer holder day before that decision was made. As it was, the two days spent visiting two universities she found she really didn't like weren't wasted, as both had been contenders on paper, one of them highly recommended by a friend's DD, who is a student there.

Great to see so many potentials for Sheff - it is great! It is one of DSs offers but will probs end up as insurance, which is what happened with DD!

As it was, the two days spent visiting two universities she found she really didn't like weren't wasted, as both had been contenders on paper

Totally agree with this - if DD hadn’t looked around Warwick/Oxford/Nottingham before applying I reckon she’d have put at least one on the form - they’re all top for the subjects she’s applied and offer a good selection of joint honours (which is why they were initially considered). Definitely not wasted time.

I was quite looking forward to open days but she wouldn’t let me come on any (apparently I’d have been embarrassing, and none of her friends went with parents). She did Oxford overnight with school, then met a friend who lives in a village betweenness Oxford and Warwick and stayed there overnight before they went to Warwick together and she came back on the train. Nottingham she travelled down on the train with a friend and kindly took DDs 3 and 4. They stayed overnight with family friends (DDs 3 and 4’s best friends - the DC are year 10 and year 7 now), went to the open day without sisters in tow and then all four got the train back. The friend loves it and is actually at Nottingham now!!

“Seems sensible to me.”

I don’t agree NicoAndTheNiners. Not all universities do offer holder days for prospective students, and I do feel you can get a feel for a place by visiting it. DD said that she would have applied to Bristol because she liked what she saw on paper, but hated it when we went. I’m glad that she didn’t waste an application on Bristol. DD didn’t like Warwick either, and is in two minds about Lancaster.

She has just had an offer from Newcastle, which is her first choice.

DD said that she would have applied to Bristol because she liked what she saw on paper, but hated it when we went.

That was one of DD's two on that 'wasted' trip.

The other one was Reading. At least she liked the city of Bristol - Reading didn't even score there.