How on Earth do a level lower achievers get to uni with the grades that are being asked?

[NCTDN]

If I wanted to go to uni now, I'd have no chance. In my day, I needed three E grades to get into teaching, from which I've had a fabulous career.
DD is very lucky and looking at places asking for 3As (Not teaching) but I'm so shocked at how high everywhere asks for. I went to what was primarily a teacher training college and even that is asking for 3 alleged at grade b.
So my question is, what do teenagers do these days if they get grades C D or E? It must be so disheartening.

The quality of A levels and uni. Not in terms of influencing pay. In terms of suitability for the job and subject knowledge.

@Piggywaspushed

Di you know what? Ironically, I think it matters more in teaching, certainly where subject specialism / academic teaching (A Level) is required.

I agree. I think perhaps that is what impacts my reaction - I spent a dozen years in a teaching career. Poorly qualified teachers were most often poor teachers. Highly qualified teachers were most often good teachers. (Not always; you can get very clever people who can't actually teach others what they know, but that type of person usually doesn't go into school teaching, and if they do they don't stay!) Especially once you get past GCSE. Giving an A level student, aiming for an A*, A or B grade, a teacher who only managed to attain an E grade in their own A levels would be unfair on the student. As an ex head of department, I wouldn't assign my staffing in such a way as to give that teacher a level classes.

In 1980 I got into University College London with BDD and those were very adequate grades. Also one person of our course of 50 people got a first. Five people got a 2.1 About 40 got a 2.2 and the rest failed. Things have changed and I have to think its grade inflation.
DS just recently got A* BB and honestly I would have got straight As at his courses as I taught him the bloody things. I havent got any cleverer over the last 30 years

No but you have got older and wiser.

All the comments from employers talking about preferring a skilled or personable person to someone with high academic qualifications, sound like they are mostly from firms that don’t attract thousands of applicants and take graduates each year.

Some types of job in some types of firm are highly sought after. Training contracts in top law firms, top accountancy firms and lots of other organisations will have thousands of applicants. Screening to reduce the numbers has to be done as not everyone can be interviewed to see if they have the personal skills etc. The first sift is often quite simply based on type of uni, degree and probably A Level results. With so many applicants they can and will be really picky and need to bin the majority, so A Level grades and uni attended and degree title or degree class (if finished) are all important. The people who get those coveted roles have top notch qualifications. They will also need to perform well in aptitude tests and probably several interviews, so academic qualifications alone probably won’t get them to job, but without those, they will likely fall at the first hurdle.

Of course lots of people who do fall at the first hurdle will go onto get jobs (if not these highly coveted ones) and have very successful careers and sometimes do better than those very highly qualified. Of course that’s true. But most people who’ve gone the route from graduate training scheme in a big firm in a very competitive industry, do have the top notch qualifications and they are expected and needed in many of those jobs. The person with BCC at A Level might be a brilliant worker and have a great career but they won’t be getting into those schemes, not these days.

@MadameMinimes and @Manteo what I don't understand is why universities don't respond with offers when a student applies with the right A levels at the right grades.

DD took a gap year and applied to Lancaster, Manchester and Newcastle for biomedical sciences, with the right grades in the right subjects in hand.

Lancaster responded with an acknowledgement, swiftly followed with an offer of a pllace and an offer of a scholarship
Newcastle didn't even acknowledge, but offered straight away

Manchester acknowledged, then - nothing.

DD withdrew her application to Manchester as she didn't really care for the place anyway and went to her first choice of Newcastle.

Why did Manchester not bother following up?

Because they decided it was fairer to compare her application to all the others I guess. It takes time. They normally have until the end of April to respond and might have had huge numbers of well qualified applicants who had failed to get into medical schools for example. I think hey should consider all applicants, pre qualified or not. Lancaster decided they would to get enough well qualified applicants so offered immediately. Ditto Newcastle. In my view they should all wait until after the closing date to evaluate all applicants but they do not all do this. Some DC have had to wait until May to be rejected this year after submitting in October.

But she already had her A levels @PresentingPercy.

Although we interview blind as to which Uni they went to we usually require a 2.1 or a 1st to try and manage the numbers of applicants.

Does this mean the applicant should not list the University (country, name off Uni) they attended?

Violet - the applicants don’t enter their Uni or school on our application form.

I know she has her A levels but there might have bern lots like this. In fact we knew there were. I don’t necessarily think that puts all those applicants above others who might apply that year. She might get an unconditional offer but not necessarily an early one. What would you do if hundreds of other applicants also looked set to meet the criteria?

I did A levels in 1984 and got 4 As - at a northern comprehensive. I was not exceptional, though certainly in the top few. Still, I was turned down from a couple of universities even then.

Some universities don’t start making offers until after a set date. Some wait until all equal-consideration applications are in, others don’t. In my experience, medical schools are often slow and not just for medicine courses. How long did she wait before withdrawing? It’s not unusual for there to be a wait of a couple of months for some courses and other offers to come back within days. Making a post-results application doesn’t always make the process any quicker either.

@WombatChocolate there are articles on the BBC website going back to 2015 where Deloitte, PWC and EY state that they have a 'university blind' approach or /and no longer use A Levels as part of their selection process. I assume that is still the case, as the move was made to increase diversity. So what you are saying for those big accountancy firms and possibly others, seems to be no longer the case.

At the time DD didn't know that she could withdraw her application so she was waiting for Manchester to make a decision so that she could firm her offer from Newcastle.

When she discovered that she could withdraw, she did so.

Hmm. Are we reallly suggesting that when sifting applicants, firms give equal waiting to Applicant A who has 3xA* and a First from Oxbridge, to someone with CCC and a First from a post-1992 uni which is ranked 135?

I know students who have taken graduate jobs in the last 2 years, who faced extremely competitive processes to get onto the schemes with the civil service and top firms in the city. They speak of everyone who is on the scheme with them being from either Oxbridge or one of the top RG unis. Are we suggesting that info isn’t known at the application stage and that the process just automatically results in them being chosen by other factors by other aspects of their application?

Most people aren’t going for these most husky competitive graduate schemes and in the end, a Level 7 instead of Level 9 or an A instead if A* probably doesn’t impact their job chances....but in these few extremely competitive industries for the highly sought after graduate entry positions, I really think it does.

So, if A level results and Uni name aren’t looked at, and thousands apply, what is it that the firm looks at in the initial sift which allows them to bin the 75% of applicants that they need to get rid of to reduce to manageable quantities before the next stage if the process, which results in nearly all of them being RG or Oxbridge? Or is it simply that their applications in all ways are so much superior in every single way and not just their grades and Uni attended? Interesting.

www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ey-blind-cv-policy-diversity-workforce-ernst-and-young-trainee-job-applications-academic-education-employers-graduate-a7558696.html?amp

Different firms use different systems but this isn’t uncommon now for corporate graduate recruitment. Aims to restrict unconscious bias and create a more diverse workplace.

@WombatChocolate if you want to increase the ethnic diversity of your workforce, then restricting your graduate intake to only RG universities which are in excess of 75% white (I'm looking at a BBC article from 2018, appreciate there will be more up to date figures) isn't going to work!

In many areas there aren't now 18 year old school leaver jobs.

That is only because what would have been jobs for 18 year old school leavers are now jobs for graduates. In fact there are plenty of jobs being filled by graduates now that would have been 16 year old school leaver jobs when I was 16!

We have massively expanded the higher education sector based on a premise that we need more highly skilled workforce, but have actually dumbed down a lot of further and higher education to keep young people in education and off the unemployment figures. But structurally, whilst we may have different skills required throughout the workforce, there is actually very little difference for the majority of the population - they have higher qualifications to be stuck in lower quartile jobs.

As a recruiter, I see plenty of graduate applications. A great many are applying for basic admin roles because they don't have the skills to apply for anything else, and don't have the grades to apply for graduate internships, which are highly competitive. And based on the applications I see, very few have massively benefited in relation to basic skills from an extra 4-6 years of education.

Interesting discussion. I’ve been involved in University applications of 3 people, 1 my own DC. Things haven’t gone quite as smoothly as could have done with all of them.

One did a resit year as didn’t get the grades wanted to go to a RG university they really wanted to go to. Didn’t with resit either bit did go somewhere, graduated with a first and is now working for Microsoft.

Another didn’t meet offer for the RG university they wanted, went to insurance. Did sandwich year at GSK, graduating shortly and going onto a PH.D at a RG in December on an exciting project. During the course of applying for Ph.D they attracted the attention of someone at Cambridge but wasn’t the quite the field they were looking at.

Other did badly in GCSE, still doesn’t have Maths. Went a creative route so portfolio was key and then moved sideways onto second year of a MFL at a RG. Was allocated the top university for year abroad that a lot of people in year wanted, current university allocated it as is one of the best at speaking, having made sure they spent a fair bit of time over there prior to Covid.

Mixed bag of results but should pass (fingers firmly crossed!) and looking at teaching. One of their lecturers being really helpful and putting in touch with a non native speaker teacher to help them after having noticed how they approached group tasks recently.

Thing that carries all 3 through is tenacity from what I have observed. Have also known a fair few others who were accepted with grades a fair bit lower than asked for.

@daisypond

I did A levels in 1984 and got 4 As - at a northern comprehensive. I was not exceptional, though certainly in the top few. Still, I was turned down from a couple of universities even then.

I did mine around that time, and I’d say you were exceptional.

@daisypond

I did A levels in 1984 and got 4 As - at a northern comprehensive. I was not exceptional, though certainly in the top few. Still, I was turned down from a couple of universities even then.

I got turned down by Exeter and Bristol but that was in the days when each university could see what other university you'd applied to and Exeter & Bristol rejected you out of hand if you'd applied to Oxbridge. DH had the same.

At least when I applied you didn't have to rank universities in the order you wanted to go to them, only alphabetically.

I got AAB in 1979 (best in school where most people did not go to university) and was turned down by Bristol and Durham as the school predicted Bs and Cs. I went to Manchester and did fine - top of year, prizes etc.

On graduate recruitment this is something I have been thinking about this week as my sons have been doing some law job applications. If recruitment were university and "grades blind" their CCC, 3rd class degree brother I suppose could be in the running along with people who actually get their finger out and do some work whatever their colour and get better grades.

By trying to be fair the process has become very time consuming for applicants who still have the tiny chance of success I had when I applied to 139 firms and at most in the 1980s filled in an application form (or just sent a CV with covering letter) and then had 2 interviews.
I had 25 interviews before getting my first law job.

Now to be fair the process is much more time consuming. Someone I saw yesterday had applied over 2 years and had had something like 4 practical exercises/days, 6 interviews - it just went on and on and on..... Is that better? Would picking out of a hat be better and less time consuming? Should we have a system using AI where a student uploads everything once only - certs, results, key words eg they like rugby or are vegan or whatever, work experience, do a psych test once, write whey they want to do law once etc etc and then upload a video saying whatever they like- why you could hire me and then the employers wade through using AI to make their choice.

@Xenia Good idea. I am sure it will also not be long before AI will be doing some/much of the work of lawyers, accountants, economists, bankers etc as well!

@Lancelottie
No, the exceptional people got 5 As at A level, including Further Maths, and went to Cambridge. There was always a couple.
A good handful would get results like mine and went off to good universities- not Oxbridge, though. None of us tried.