Do admissions tutors judge applicants on engagement with online events?

[miaowmiaowmo]

DS is waiting to hear from UCL. He has applied for a very competitive course. We live in London, and until this week he was fairly certain he wanted to go elsewhere, so hasn't engaged with their applicant open events before now..Is this likely to count against him?

It depends what you mean by online events. Open days etc, no. But optional online tasks linked to application? Yes

Depends what you mean. I used to work in an admissions office and we often had parents think we kept a record of who attended open days.

We didn't. Admissions tutors would have no idea who came to an event or who didn't.

Former RG admissions tutor here. Professor Plu

Sorry for the mistaken post. ProfessoPlumb is correct that we don’t care about engagement with online Open Days or School events. I doubt anyone would check up. Failing to complete required forms sent by the School would be bad but I am having difficulty imagining that such would be exist.
Optional forms etc sent by the School could conceivably be used as a proxy for interest but extrapolating from that to an admissions decision seems unlikely to me

Thanks all, sounds reassuring. They are "find out more about the department and talk to current students" events, for applicants.

I can't see how they would have the time to monitor such pages. BUT, last year dd got an offer from a university that was subsequently dropped by 2 grades on the condition that she attended their online open day and another online event. They didn't do any type of attendance roll, so not sure how they checked who had 'attended' and who hadn't.
My ds is applying for a very competitive course and received a separate form asking for online events/courses he has taken that are related to the course. It asks for dates and topics covered, so if required something like this could be checked out I assume.

I would not expect much uptake at all from the type of event you have described! But I suppose it would not hurt to engage and it is just barely, conceivably possible that when all else is equal the last couple of places will go to those who have done so. It can get that random. But I would be very surprised.

If any of the events were hosted on Zoom or Teams, then the university would know who the participants were. At least some of the online open days that I have 'attended' with DS2 have required preregistration and the offer holder events for him definitely did, in the same way as in-person ones do. Theoretically, even without preregistration they would at least be able to look at a log of IP addresses from which the site was accessed, but I suspect that trying to match those up to applicants would be many steps too far.

Personally, having decided that after all, I would like to go somewhere that I applied to sight unseen, I think I would be trying to find out as much as possible about the institution / course etc. Or is he not feeling the need to do this as he has prior knowledge/ experience?

They are online events He has only just decided that it may be his highest preference rather than his lowest. He's missed one event, but has booked on the second (using his name and email address).