Soft A levels

[Judy1234]

What annoys me about the article on page 1 of today's Sunday Times is that some state schools are not telling children that some Alevels are a load of rubbish or rather they aren't counted by the universities. Of course accountancy, law, theatre studies or any other studies are not going to be counted in the way as maths, French, history. All children know that in private schools and yet it says some state schools are keen for children to do the software easier a levels to get their places up in the league tables even at the cost of children then being surprised that the 3 As in needlework, cooking and gym don't count for much at Oxford or Manchester.

Some universities are publishing their lists of A levels that don't count which is helpful.

This might be why state school pupils are finding it hard to get into the good universities..."new analysis.. shows a gulf was emerging between state and private schools as comprehensives opted for soft A levels and independents and grammars tightened their trip on traditional academic subjects..the task of widening participation becomes harder." Most of the country doesn't have grammar schools so the cleverer of the the children in the comps are the ones suffering from this.

Media studies 95% non selective state schools take that. For sciences fewer than 1 in 10 A level pupils in non selective schools takes sciences compared with one third in grammars and independents.

arionater thankyou so much for that.I just read your thread out to ds and he looked suitably bemused !! i wish his school did critical thinking - instead he is forced to do general studies!
he is so desperate to go to oxford and is lucky to be an all-rounder - I am finding him hard work to pin down his choices!

Was it this one, pybf?

"What should be happening but isn't is students saying I am paying over £3k a year for this and I am only getting XYZ hours a week and not enough help or tutorials" Isn't happening? God, I wish, Xenia. You're right about the cost - £3k does not go very far at all, and the problem is that students now think that because they're paying the university "owes" them a good degree. It owes them as good an education as it can give, but too many students expect an equivalent level of handholding that they've become used to in school, and the independent study element falls by the wayside a bit.

Glad it was helpful paulayates - just don't let his school convince him that we care about his extra-curricular activities (pet hate! amazing how unshiftably convinced the schools are about this one, even many of the best - insider information: most candidates have very impressive outside interests/activities, because they are generally impressive and engaged teenagers, but we really really don't care about your sports/music/voluntary work/plans for world domination . . . sorry!)

May be but there should be the same number of tutorials you get at Oxbridge. I think my daughter loved having between 3 - 5 hours lectures a week though... so not all student complain.

arionater discussing this matter with ds and was obviously ill informed.. what is important then? Personality and academic ability alone?

arionater, I was wondering that - if extra-mural activities are of no help in deciding who to interview, what is? How should they best get their personal charm, magnetism and general intelligence across in a personal statement?

MrHab taught at Cambridge for a while, and had less contact hours with his students there than at other universities he's taught at. You're also more likely to be taught by postgrads/badly paid postdocs at Oxbridge, which is how they keep their staff-student ratios down.

Haven't read all this thread, but Xenias please tell me what A Level needlework is.

I teach Textile Technology to A Level, and ONLY the very brightest students can cope with the theory side of it. It is extremely demanding and scientific, and has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Needlework.

It is a new subject, hence the snobbery associated with the more traditional subjects. But soft option...ha ha ha.

But should 'personal charm and magnetism' be of any relevance in determining university places?

As well as the personal statement there is a reference from the pupil's tutor - in DD's college this is 'condensed' from detailed references from each subject tutor and is presumably meant to address the 'general intelligence' bit.

I have been sitting at the kitchen table reading bits of this thread out to DH and (generally) whooping with agreement! DH is a maths teacher and I run the RS dept at our school. I would say (and no, I am not being defensive - much) that RS is seen as an "academic" A level in the same way that History/English etc are. The problem is that many of us remember the RS that was taught when we were at school when it was Scripture and the one that everyone did early!
When I started teaching 12 years ago we did not get the really bright pupils taking RS but now we have some of the strongest and quite a few of those who are successful at Oxbridge in a variety of subjects have studied RS.
Arianater - thank you for comments re personal statement - exactly what I have been trying to say to pupils who are v happy to try and save the planet but won't READ!!!!

A lot of private schools do RS and I would have thought it was a reasonably hard a level to do particularyl if you have 3 other hard AS levels. I wouldnt' class it with media studies.

As for personality etc most universities don't interview and I think on the whole it's the A level grades (and perhaps personal statement) and school's view that are key but those that interview then yes they are looking at how you do in that interview and there are always complaints that private schools with special oxbridge classes are going to be preparing you better for that never mind years of public debates, the posher accent, the wider vocabulary or whatever that means it's an unfair advantage perhaps.

When I did mock university interviews for sixth formers I wanted to hear about them, what sort of people they were, one was involved in rescue of political dissidents on cruise ships or something via her church.. in other words doesn't that much matter what their interests are as long as they are articulate, have something they are enthusiastic about and a passion for the subject they want to study.

Needlwork - my best friend at school who changed schools at 6th form was brilliant at sewing and got an A in her course work (and E in the written work and a E over all... I suppose at least she passed) and that was her career - repairs, dry cleaning etc so the typing and bookeeping and other exams she did were useful too.

Yes but how do they get an interview, Xenia? What makes a personal statement stand out, if extra-curricular activities don't count as arionater said?

Extra curricular activities do count. My experience is with universities like Bristol who didn't interview my children so it was all about the personal statement, grades and head's report. A good few students one year had identical personal s's which they had bought from an on line site and they were caught out. So obviously avoid that. My first daughter started with this little anecdote about winning the cruise down the Nile. Then I usppose they are looking for people who do a bit more than sit in their room playing computer games so it probably helps if you are captain of sport at school, did the silver of Gold Duke of Edinburgh award, play in the school orchestra or whatever your hobbies are - won a chess competition or stamp collecting and also say a bit about your work experience.

They also wrote about the subject - what bits of the A level they liked that was relevant to the subject to be studied. I have never read or looked at a single bit of my children's GCSE or A level course work ever - can't be bothered and don't believe in that but I did read their personal statements before they went to the school for checking to look at any typos etc.

The best one I read was my daughter's friend who went to Oxford but I can't remember now what was on it - just loads of really interesting stuff in her church, in her hobbies, in her charitable work abroad etc

So is RS an exception to the "subjects-ending-in-studies" rule?

But Xenia, all you know is what they wrote in their personal statements, and whether they got an interview. You don't know what it was on the UCAS form that swung it for your dd. And someone who does the selection has said it isn't that important...

Not interview - place

Someone at Oxbridge though - but at other unviersities without interviews where a lot of those applying have AA and AAB the ONLY thing to distinguish them is the teacher's report and the statement so the extra curricular stuff on that will matter.

interesting correlation xenia

private school= wider vocabulary

another little known fact is that state schools do have debating societies

god help your dc if they marry a state schooled individual - those family meals with MIL

My ex husband went to a state school. My daughter's boyfriend went to a state school.

The Government study was about vocabulary of 3 - 5 year olds and was about class rather than schooling. Some parents use more words per day sometimes 3 times as many as others. I am afraid it's in state schools I have seen school signs with apostrophes in the wrong place not private schools but 94% of children go to state schools so in a sense private schools are irrelevant.

Funnily enough it was our very highly acclaimed local prep school where dh and i guggled at a spelling eror on the entrance hall wall!

Funnily enough it was our very highly acclaimed local prep school where dh and i giggled at a spelling eror on the entrance hall wall!

It is basically the academic side that matters, yes; each application consists of various parts: GCSE and AS grades, predicted A-level grades, the school report, the personal statement, school work that candidates send up in advance, the interview itself and, increasingly for many subjects, some kind of test or exam, whether a standardised one sat at school or tests they take at the college when they come up for interview (eg a translation exercise for languages). We do de-select a few applicants - that is, decide not to invite them for interview - and if that's the case it'll be on the basis of insufficient grades and/or a weak performance in an entrance test sat at school. We do interview most applicants, though, and that's true of Cambridge too.

As I think I said earlier in this thread, several of the aspects are, at least in my experience, more of a 'hurdle' to be got over, and are then rather set aside - I'd include under these the grades (both predicted and attained), the report, and to some extent the personal statement too. Of course we might refer to these in interview - perhaps asking a candidate with unusually poor GCSEs what happened, or starting off the interview with an interest mentioned in the personal statement - but really these are more useful for giving an impression of a plausible candidate, and become less relevant further on. (This must be different of course for universities that are not interviewing.) Almost everyone who applies to us will be predicted straight As now, so from that point of view A-levels have, sadly, become almost irrelevant to us.

So prior to the interviews, tutors sit together and discuss the work that has been sent up (this will have been assessed and given a grade or rank of some kind - if, say, a music candidate sends an English literature essay, it'll be passed to an English fellow for their opinion) together with the results of the entrance test taken at school/upon arrival in Oxford, for those subjects which set one. On this basis, they'll have some idea of a rough rank order of candidates. If you are interviewing, say, 15 for 5 places, it is quite likely that there is 1 (or perhaps 2) who, on the basis of their work/test results, seems very strong; and perhaps 3-5 who seem unlikely to be strong enough. The real competition, to be honest, is amongst the middle 7-10 for the remaining 3 or 4 places. Similarly at interview, the very brightest are, to be honest, pretty unmissable, and the weakest few (comparatively - obviously these are all intelligent people) are usually equally obvious. (This is why students who feel they had a 'very tough' interview are sometimes surprised to find they have got in: tutors will usually be kind to someone really struggling, but will push someone who seems like they might be good enough to see what they can produce/how far they can follow a line of thought.) The peculiar thing about Oxbridge teaching is the very small tutorial groups (1-3) so tutors want to feel that this is someone they could teach enjoyably for 3 or 4 years: that is very much part of the dynamic of an interview, and the successful candidates are almost always those who are able to take a correction on board, think about it, and move on intelligently - it's not about being 'right', much more about demonstrating that you can think. Tutors purposefully try to avoid asking questions that depend upon particular knowledge (because obviously mediocre students with 18 years excellent education behind them often do know more than very bright students from a less good school); and at least in my experience we also try to avoid the kind of 'so why do you want to come to my college?' type questions which are easily prepared for (except perhaps as an ice-breaker). We want to see evidence of some real excitement too: the people giving these interviews have devoted their entire careers to the subject in question, after all!

We try very hard to ensure that candidates who we feel are good enough to be here, but whom our particular college doesn't have room for, get passed to another college or colleges for second interviews (in some subjects everyone gets interviewed at a second college as a matter of course); similarly if someone seemed very good on paper, but botched the interview; or just seemed horribly nervous - quite a lot of candidates relax and do much better second time round, when they feel they've nothing to lose.

Hope that helps - sorry it's so long . . .

arionater your words fall on very keen ears
thankyou so so much i shall get ds to read this...
i shall keep you posted

I did Religious Studies at O-level - it was much like Eng Lit but with the synoptic Gospels instead of Romeo and Juliet. Obviously this was rather a long time ago and O not A.

If you go back far enough, I bet there was plenty of snobbery when universities started teaching anything other than Classics. Eng Lit? Good gracious man, have you no Latin? Engineering? Isn't that something to do with shipyards?

The idea that 'studies' = third best is sheer prejudice. To take just one example, media studies strikes me as a bloody useful subject given we are living through a communications revolution - as important for this century as the industrial revolution was to the 19th.