@SeasonFinale
I had typed out a thought I had which clearly my phone thought was crap and decided to delete it
What about if instead of a personal statement there was an application form along the lines of the unifrog one with sections that could include supra curricular, extra curricular, sections for medics and the unis could say which sections they would use, which they would ignore, whether they use as a tiebreak only or use holistically or not at all. That way people would be able to see what clearly what they were looking for and ensure they applied to unis that cherished their strengths . As I said a random thought and I am sure there may be a reason why it wouldn't work, but probably not less so that the current PS?
The trouble is, as has been noted here, different courses use the personal statement differently.
For the course I teach on and was previously the admissions tutor for, we are not really interested in knowing what someone has done. We do not go through the forms ticking off whether someone has done DoE or won an essay competition.
What we are interested in and are looking for is what someone has done with whatever information or experience they have chosen to tell us about. We are looking for evidence that they can think critically and holistically about it and reflect upon how it has developed their thinking, their interest in the subject and what they have done to build on this initial spark of interest or would propose to do in the future.
We look for those things primarily because they are skills they need to succeed on the course.
But we are also very aware that different people have different resources available to them, whether these resources are money, time, support from their school or their family or just general knowledge of what opportunities exist to pursue their interests. So we try to level the playing field.
If someone can tell us clearly and convincingly how watching YouTube videos or even the old chestnut 'socialising' has made them think about issues related to the subject they want to study, how they have reflected and sought to develop their thinking further and more academically, these things have absolutely equal value to someone telling us those things about their year spent feeding orphans.
We provide quite extensive advice on completing the personal statement, but really the best advice is encapsulated in one line within it - be interested, be interesting.
Once we have cut the people who are too far from getting the grades we ask for or who don't meet other hard criteria, we still need to make decisions about well over 1,000 perfectly clever and perfectly capable applicants, and we need to reject around 60% of those perfectly clever and perfectly capable applicants who would almost certainly do perfectly well on the course if we were to accept them. Being the 367th person who informs us they have done DoE or the 459th piano player does not, in isolation, make you either interested or interesting enough.