No offer despite better than required A levels

[Midlifephoenix]

If a university states the offer level requirements for a course is, say, A,A,B, and your predicted grades are A*,A,A, surely you could expect to get offered a place? Extra curricular includes gold D of E, grade 8 music and work experience in the proposed field of study etc. Do you think the increased last year acceptances due to the better grades plus those who deferred entry last year has decreased the numbers universities are admitting this year? It was the second choice so now fear she won't get her first choice which is tougher!

OP did your DD get any offers at all?

You cannot ‘expect’ to get an offer because you have met (or indeed exceeded) the required grades. Many others will have done so too.
A earlier applicant may have been amazing .. amazing enough that the uni bagged them straight away or unusually amazing given the context of their education or background?
I hope your dc has other offers that they are happy with OP. Dc has been rejected from 1 place. I imagine that with fewer places this year ( deferments and not wanting to over offer due to tags) and with the popularity of some courses with lots of applications from high performing students, unis have a nigh on impossible task

It seems to be highly competitive this year, maybe as 30% of pupils deferred last year

Where did the 30% figure come from? Just curious. At my institution we saw no drop in numbers on undergraduate courses this year.

It's completely understandable that parents are disappointed when their DC are disappointed and rejected for the first time.

Universities have always given out early offers. Last year DD received her first offer from Warwick within a week of submitting her UCAS form, an offer from York a week later and from Durham shortly before her Oxford interview. Parents are frustrated on other theads because the usual suspects are making their DC wait for a decision. It seems the universities are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Some universities have always held back on making the bulk of their offers. DC whose parents thought they would be a shoe in are always surprised when they're not when offers come out in bulk and comparisons are made.

Most students apply to a couple of aspirational unis, one or two certainties and one comfortable choice. Unfortunately, highly able children are often encouraged to apply to the same top unis and forget that although they may receive an offer below their predicted grades, most applicants have also applied with the same stellar grades as them and they can't all receive an offer. Basic supply and demand rules that some will be rejected. Fortunately most DC have seen some of their friends suffer the same fate, perhaps from the same uni, accept it after initial disappointment and tend to move on quickly.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. In a typical year with exams, only around 20% of students meet or exceed their predicted grade. Safe in this knowledge, Unis over offer by a large margin, and can afford to do so throughout the application period.

However when exams were cancelled after Unis had started giving out offers at their usual rate, they realised that closer to 100% of students may make their predicted grades. So had to change the goal posts. I can understand why many would see this as unfair. There has been some talk on another thread that a certain Uni gives out contextual offers first as a matter of course, before moving to regular offers and now can’t give out regular offers to potentially brighter students, in case they end up oversubscribed.

Other Unis, like LSE, seem to have got it right and not made any offers before the application dead line and are now able to treat all applications equally. Obviously having a large number of applications to go through at I once rather that spread throughout the application period means offers are delayed.

If the final deferral figure was 30%, an awful lot of universities must have accepted an awful lot of requests to defer between late June and the start of term?
www.ucas.com/corporate/news-and-key-documents/news/rise-number-students-planning-start-university-autumn
(Total applications up 1% from the 2019 figure, total holding offers for a deferred place down 1%, actual figures 20,690 out of 500,340).

Where have you got the figure that there were 30% deferrals from?

Please ignore the pp assertion that there were 30% deferrals which is simply not the case.

As regards those reapplying with grades in hand there will.also not be as many of those as some seem to believe either as many were grabbing on to those offers they achieved with their CAGS that were otherwise aspirational which is why the unis had to find extra places for them with some deferrals but the 30% figure bandied about above with no source is irresponsible and scaremongering.

Remember that 2020 was a particularly low birth rate and therefore there were naturally more 18 year olds applying this year and there will be even more next year.

There has been some talk on another thread that a certain Uni gives out contextual offers first as a matter of course, before moving to regular offers and now can’t give out regular offers to potentially brighter students, in case they end up oversubscribed

And again, how do people know that these contextual offers are for less "bright" students? Ds has one contextual offer due to where we live, nothing at all about him or his ability to be able to achieve his predicted grades of 3 A*s. Just because we live near to a pretty rough area with a very high density of housing where not so many of those occupants go onto higher education does not change the fact that my child is, quite frankly, amazing, dedicated, driven and has proven he is smart enough and capable enough to go to the top unis who have offered him a place.

Yes they attended the same secondary school as they are in the same catchment, their home life may well be very different but the school does everything it can to address those disadvantaged pupils.

Due to TAGs and no cap on grades many, many students will meet their predicted grades that were on UCAS. This means there are simply too many candidates applying for a limited number of places. I do think there is an element of being in a top performing school and being told you are special only to find that actually many other students across the country are also special which includes international students some of whom have English as a second language.

This was an issue that was foreseeable when the exams were cancelled.

Every year there's hundreds of candidates in every subject working near to a grade boundary. So someone consistently working at high B to low A will get an A this year as school has evidence for this. However they were just as likely to have got a B in the exam if it didn't quite go their way.

The universities can't suddenly magic up more places, accommodation etc if they find themselves hugely oversubscribed by everyone meeting their offer.

I feel very sorry for these students but I'm not sure what the universities can do🤷🏼‍♀️

I would also be wary of a course that suddenly manages to vastly increase it's numbers. Probably means it's going to be mainly taught online!

“There has been some talk on another thread that a certain Uni gives out contextual offers first as a matter of course, before moving to regular offers and now can’t give out regular offers to potentially brighter students, in case they end up oversubscribed”

Dc also has a contextual early offer from one of those certain unis I think . This is due to Gcse school attended ( A8 less than 40%) and postcode. Predicted AAA*A and has 9999999988 at gcse. I’m not going to lie.. I was slightly miffed by that comment which implies that early /contextual offers went to kids who are potentially less bright than those considered/ turned away later.

There are bound to be a few mistakes made every year. I don’t think it’s an exact science but what are we actually saying here?- that when push comes to shove, all attempts to redress the balance of a child’s unfair educational disadvantage should just go out of the window?

I feel all Unis should move to an offer date. If Oxbridge can manage it why can't others? Will save students and parents a lot of stress. In addition all accommodation should be open after results day. Unnecessary pressure on students to accept offers before hearings from all their choices.

Whilst students that receive contextual offers may be as bright or even brighter than those who are ineligible, why would they get their offers earlier? The whole idea of equal chance etc is that all students are considered equally.

At one open day they were quite open about the fact that if you ticked a number of contextual boxes you would get your offer faster and it was frustrating to see people on here and TSR getting offers almost by return while others had to wait 6 months . Also the difference in the offer given is huge in some cases A* AA to ABB which is a big difference . Surely it would be better to offer to cohort you want including social mix and give all the same offer of ABB. more like in the US.

There is an interesting American Life podcast on how this is playing out in the States in terms of levelling ( or not) the playing field.

I have become very sceptical of contextual after a close friends son was staggered to get a reduced offer because despite living in a house with several acres, 6 beds and a swimming pool and going to a top independent for A level got a financial scholarship and reduced offer because his postcode was a signifier plus he went to a new state school for GCSE which had no history for context. He declined it actually but it shows what a blunt took some of the algorithms are .

Thankfully it's a tiny minority, but some people seem to think that contextual consideration and contextual offers deprive their children of their rightful place at elite universities. They forget that the system is designed to address inequality and those students usually thoroughly deserve their offers and will often exceed them, despite not having the privileged education of others.

At least by making contextual & other offers to students they feel able to make a clear decision on early, some students will turn down their place at Durham, UCL, LSE etc before the bulk of offers are made. That frees up spaces so those universities can make offers to the majority of students with more certainty about potential numbers.

They never seem to be quite so miffed when Oxford Brookes, Newcastle, Royal Holloway etc make early or contextual offers.

Just to be clear I am very much in favour of widening access I just think that the way universities are operating at the moment it’s a very blunt tool and largely enables the universities to tick the box without actually doing much good. Ultimately the goal is social mobility and I am not sure that having a cohort where 50% have had to stretch for very high offers (and let’s be clear these are not all braying public school types , most are from leafy comps and grammar schools ) and the other half have much lower offers albeit obtained with much less support, makes for a very mixed and cohesive cohort.

Far better to make offers to a socially mixed cohort and then make the grades demanded achievable to that they pretty much all accept.

Really the worst problem affecting social mobility is the stupidity of having to offer places on the basis of conditional grades which are much more easily played by the privileged . We need to come up with a much better system altogether .

I agree @MrsTabithaTwitchit about the stupidity of conditional grades

@Hoghgyni well as far as I know a lot of DC's have been asked to delay their decisions until they have received ALL offers and in any case until later in the year when teachers have been given a clearer guidance on how grades will be awarded

And incidentally Oxford Brookes has a woeful record on state school offers, it’s percentage of state school entrants is lower then Oxford University, Exeter and Bristol for example and they have still not come up with a plan acceptable to the office of Students for widening access.

@Midlifelady

Gcse grades were six 9s the rest 8s. I would have thought the extra stuff (d of e and music) would help when deciding between kids that have the same grades - i realise that many children will have the same predictions. He has got in to his third choice, but it's a distant third. I also know of a girl who got all 9s at GCSE, did an extra one on her own in Y10 'just for fun' (got a 9 too), was in cadets, drama, sang, volunteered all over the place, all A* predicted (your all around perfect candidate - bright, creative, self motivated, etc), and didn't get in to Cambridge (to do English).

No, apart from Durham who tend to like these things, the majority of universities are not interested in anything extra curricular as they realise that access to such things depends a lot on what school you attend and whether your parents can afford to finance them.

Supra curricular relevant to the subject, such as doing moocs, watching podcasts or reading books on topics not on the A level syllabus are of more worth.

I doubt if many state school applicants holding their dream offer from Oxford or Cambridge will hold back, as they know that Durham won't have any leeway for an insurance place on results day and the offer will be for equal or higher grades anyway.

Even Durham say no more than a sentence on extra curricular. My ds received an offer without any extra curricular being mentioned in his PS which was a shame because he did loads . As pp said what they want is super curricular.

You make it sound as though Oxbridge and Durham are the only universities in Uk @Hoghgyni

My state comprehensive educated child, who didn't get all 9s at gcse, has received 5 offers from russell group universities.

His personal statement was 99% subject based and the extra curricular he mentioned was related to the course he was applying for.

Gold duke of Edinburgh is worth far less than people think!