Applying to Oxbridge for 2023 intake

[riverpebbles]

Not sure if there is already a thread on this? My son is hoping to apply to Cambridge for Computer Science for October 2023 start.

@juicy0 - if you are thinking of US for a 2023 start I think you need to make rapid progress. The cycle is well advanced!

WhiteCarnation DS1 read Medicine at Oxford. Your DC won't need three A star predictions but he will absolutely need to have predictions which meet the standard offer, which he appears to. That said, if the A grade is Chemistry that may be a factor which weighs in the post interview deliberations, when the tutors are deciding which interviewees to offer to. Chemistry is the big one. He will be competing with a field of students with multiple A star, which may well reflect their higher all round ability (or the ease with which their teachers predict A star; rather less important!). The two students who got Oxford offers from DS1's school in his school year both happened to have five plus A stars at A level and 12 A star GCSEs (in the days when those grades were rare), whereas the two other applicants who applied with slightly fewer at both GCSE and A level didn't get an offer, but clearly applicants do get in with less good stats.

@juicy0
I have a DD at an Ivy. She only started the process the September before she started but it was a huge amount of work. There are a lot of essays to be written.
On the costs, some of the top schools are fully needs met by way of bursary for all students. So they are means tested and given a bursary to cover all costs. Fees, accommodation, meal plan, books, even a return flight home once a year.
So if you meet the means tests you can get very substantial grants and graduate debt free.

Apert from perhaps medicine and primary ed ,they don't give a fig about you being a rounded person, and in fact a lot of students are the opposite

The STEP papers trip up around 50%. You definitely don't need to be outstandingly at maths.DS2 did maths at Cambridge and wasn't the best mathematicians in his class let alone school he certainly wasn't outstanding. He was hugely interested in maths though

Cambridge are usually a lot less interested in gcses than Oxford.Thus year I think they will be less important because they are not consistent from school to school

I think DD is applying for national sci at Cambridge. She doesn't really want to go, her heart is in biology at St Andrew's but she thinks she will have a whack at Cambridge

Bloody typing !Natural Sciences

It's quite hard to turn down Oxbridge once you get an offer, so this could lead to some doubts and regrets along the way!

the odds are she wont get an offer anyway.

that was me with a name change btw- i wasnt being bitchy about anyone else's dc

Well, it was a major effort last week but DS got his organ scholarship applications in on time. I understand he's put Cambridge first (his initial inclination but informed by a number of things including a detailed discussion with a maths academic friend of ours, for which I was grateful!). Scarily it is only two weeks before he'll be in the midst of auditions and interviews! He knows others applying, we may offer to give a couple of lifts for the transfer between Cambridge and Oxford (the process takes a week, shared between the two).

I suspect when it comes to UCAS he'll be submitting a partial application and adding on other universities as he gets time to research them, but I could be mistaken. I haven't seen his PS, but he did let his sister help for which I was grateful. One final round of revision at school and he has to send any updates in this week I think.

@OxbridgeHopeful all the very best for the auditions - sounds like a gruelling process but will gi be him a sense of what’s involved. I guess even if offered an organ scholarship there is still the academic tests and interviews to do on top.

Yes there are; but some of those will happen during the audition week. So later on he may be relaxing when his friends are busy. Possibly ...

For Oxford, is predicted 3As a competitive application or is higher actually expected but just not stated?

It’s the minimum requirement, so in that sense it’s on the low side. Most candidates will be predicted or have at least some A*. Some courses will have a higher minimum.

But nobody gets in unless they apply.

Assume they're applying for humanities. DD exceeded the offer 2 years ago during the Covid fiasco and had higher PGs. Her grades are still in the bottom 20% for her year group, but she nailed the TSA with a score comfortably in the top 15%.

The other thing to consider is whether the student is studying at a historically high achieving school. If they do AAA probably wouldn't be competitive.

DS1 and DD were advised not to apply with less than 2 A star predictions but came from a school where the norm.

Where the predicted grades exactly equal the standard offer then the application will pass the first hurdle for consideration rather than being binned at the outset. But those who are in each cohort overwhelmingly exceed those grades, and there is an obvious reason for that.

Y13 predictions are only looked at to get the application to the next stage. High achieving schools will tend to deter those with more modest predictions because the rest of their application is likely to be insufficiently strong, so it's not about A level grades themselves.

Also Oxford isn't daft - some schools massively over predict. It's much safer for them to look at what's actually been achieved.

NCforthis864 - for context, you can look at the stats for Cambridge and see that less than 5% of students actually at the uni "only" achieved AAA in the A-levels. I'm sure Oxford will be the same. Those students must have been exceptional in entrance tests / interviews or perhaps applied from circumstances that were highly contextualised..

This might be of interest to applicants for Oxford

And this image shows actual A Level grades of those who secured their places - much higher than the offers in many cases. (NB these are TAG during Covid)

Compared with Cambridge Oxford make fewer less demanding offers with the selection taking place via their own tests as well the interviews. In reality those with offers from Oxford on the whole achieve higher than asked in their offer.

These are though only statistics and shouldn’t put off anyone applying whose predictions meets the offer bar especially if they have contextual circumstances. Working hard for the pre interview tests (if your subject has them) is also critical.

Good luck to all - nothing ventured nothing gained - especially with a strategic approach to the application. And a tip from having been through this twice recently do place similar effort in choosing other unis too especially one they love likely to make an offer with a comfortably achievable ask.
It reduces stress during A Levels and the summer.

Cohorts are growing until 2030 so competition for uni places only likely to increase.

Interesting. My niece was one of the 445 or 196, depending on how you view a teacher-assessed grade of 2A* and A that was moderated down and then up again in the 2020 cycle. She does feel quite low in the cohort and isn't finding the pace easy, I think. Those results suggest that that's because she's in the bottom third for the first time in her education, rather than floating near the top.