@Shimy For us it is a mixture of personal statement and school reference. It is important to note that we are talking about very high achieving and accomplished students and our assessment of quality is relative to other very high achieving and accomplished cohorts of students. We would not say they are generally low quality students or terribly deficient in their knowledge or ability.
I am not the Admissions Tutor and have read no actual applications this year, so can only go by their summary feedback.
Generally, we have a higher proportion of applicants who are perfectly fine. When you are reviewing applications, you expect a certain proportion of them to be first-pass decisions - you can read their application and immediately decide yes or no.
This year, about 55% of all applications for my department's most popular course were a definite no in the first-pass, which is roughly in-line with what we would usually see. But only around 20% were a definite yes, which is low. The rest were maybes. The maybe applications are fine, they are competent students who could do the course and there is nothing wrong with them, indeed about 60% of them will end up getting an offer, but there is also nothing that says definitely choose me now because you will see no-one better. These applicants have to go around again to be split into the 60% who will get an offer and the 40% who won't. This is one of the reasons admissions has taken longer this year.
One of the reasons for this is, of course, that there are fewer applicants who can be boosted across the yes / maybe line by their exceptional grades. However, there are other common issues that seem to have cropped up more frequently.
For personal statements, issues that make an application seem weak can be broken down into two areas: one that is largely about the applicant's ability to use the personal statement to demonstrate what we are looking for; and one that is about their demonstrated intellectual ability.
For the first area, common issues are :
- Laundry lists. For the personal statement, we are quite explicit about the purpose of it and what we are looking for. We state quite clearly that the personal statement allows us to assess an applicant's ability to construct a clear and well-reasoned narrative showing why they want to study the subject. We want to know what interests someone, why it interests them and what they have done to develop their interest.
Being able to construct a well-researched, thought-through and coherent argument is an important skill for our course, as it is for courses at similar level institutions the applicant might also be applying to. This is the applicant's opportunity to show that they are at least on the way to being able to do that. Ignoring our instructions and guidance on how we evaluate the personal statement because you want to tell us that you did this, and this, and this, no matter how prestigious the thises are or how proud you are of them, makes an application weak because it does not demonstrate one of the most essential things we are looking for.
We have seen 'the usual laundry lists' but apparently nothing exceptional here.
- Boilerplates. This has been a growing issue for some years now. This is where the applicant has essentially acquired some kind of template of what a successful application looks like, whether from their school, the internet or somewhere else, and has to various extents copied it.
Being able to look at something successful and learn from it is a good thing. Sticking so rigidly to it that you are basically treating it like a 5 year old's fill in the blanks writing exercise - At the weekend I went to the [beach / shops / park]. It was [fun / busy / closed] - is not.
While these kinds of personal statements are generally well-written, and they are particularly common amongst the maybe group, there are two reasons why it is problematic. Firstly, it doesn't show the applicant's own ability to construct and develop a line of thought or to write coherently, it shows the ability of whoever wrote the thing they are using as their template. It also encourages applicants to force in things that are not actually impressive or relevant because they think they have to tick every box that the template application did. It can also be a sign if a lack of thought, effort or the applicant lacking confidence in their own intellectual ability.
Secondly, and of particular relevance to this cohort, it produces an awful lot of very samey personal statements. When you are applying for a course with 2,000 applicants, most of whom will be rejected, having something that is so very fundamentally the same as many other applicants does not work in your favour. This is particularly an issue for this cohort because their similar and not very reliable grades mean that they already have one part of their application where it is harder for them to stand out, adding another one gives you a fine, but decidedly average in the cohort, application. The most average, 50th percentage point applicant, will for these kinds of courses, be rejected. That is just how the stats work.
Common issues related to demonstrated intellectual ability are:
- Jones says / Voice of God. These are two extremes of poor understanding of how to develop and analyse an issue.
'Jones says' can take two forms. One is where the applicant simply tells us what someone, often someone quite name droppingly famous, has said, perhaps with a vague 'so that's interesting' tacked on. It is good to have read things, but we assume already that you can read, so just providing some not entirely convincing summary as if to prove you have read it, is lower quality work.
The second form of 'Jones says' is where someone goes on and on and on about one single author's one piece of work that they have read with no critical understanding of it, its relevance or situatedness within the broader field or any development of their own thinking or other reading. They tell us something is really interesting, but not so interesting to them that they are willing to put in any work or thought beyond having identified its interestingness. This comes across as lazy, uncommitted and disinterested and shows a lack of understanding of how to research and develop thought.
'Voice of God' is where the applicant provides no tangible evidence for their thinking. What they write might be interesting, it might be decently thought through, but it is essentially a think piece and shows a lack of understanding of how to conduct and present academic thought. It can also be a sign of someone who will prove to be difficult to teach.
- Specious, spurious and just plain wrong. It is always a plus in an application when someone attempts to analyse and develop and link their thinking together, but this is where there are fundamental flaws in an applicant's argument, discussion or evidence that we would expect someone of the level we are looking for to pick up. Not doing so suggests either a poor understanding of the material they are using or of analytical processes or an intellectual laziness.
The most common form of this is 'x so d' where the applicant states one thing then goes on to insist that it therefore tells them or us something quite different that doesn't follow from their initial proposition. This can be in relation to something they have read or some activity that they have done that they really want to make mean something bigger, better and more meaningful than it is.
- General lack of thought. This is much like the laundry list where the applicant has just provided a series of disconnected paragraphs as though we were ticking things off on a list and they needed to provide one paragraph on 'things I have read' and then one paragraph on 'things I have done' and then one paragraph on 'how I'm a team player and can cope with lots of work'. There is nothing essentially wrong with this, but it does not demonstrate a depth of thought and understanding.
Intellectual errors, particularly errors of reasoning, are always more forgivable, because we would always rather someone tried even if they didn't do such a good job than that they didn't try and just listed out 'I have done this competition and that means I am really great and I have done DoE and that means I am a team player' and so on.
In terms of this years cohort, it seems we are seeing more 'Voice of God'ing and more grandiose but ultimately fallacious thinking. To an extent this reflects their very disrupted teaching, they simply have not learnt and practiced how to think at the academic level we require, but these applicants are supposed to be amongst the best of the best and we expect a level of self-direction and ability to learn, explore and understand by yourself to avoid such issues. We will expect this of them if they come to study with us.
Although it might seem like a lottery from the outside, a decent admissions tutor would be able to give a reason for every offer and every rejection.
For most applicants the school statements always tend to be much of a muchness outside of providing context on the school, although apparently this year they have been more 'lukewarm' than we might expect. I only have a vague understanding of what they mean here, but it seems some schools seemed a bit unwilling to commit to definitive statements on applicants (5th in a strong cohort of 89 type statements) and spent too much time saying what a hard time all pupils had had rather than providing any specific evidence or guidance as to whether we should think this particular applicant had been especially affected or had done anything exceptional in that context.
We try really hard not to penalise an applicant for having a school that writes a generally quite weak statement for them (this being different to when a school identifies real negatives about an applicant, but this rarely happens) but taken collectively it seems there was a sense of 'meh' about them which adds to the general assessment of quality.
@fishingeagle For my department, in a normal year between 4 and 8 first year students will drop out which is too small a number to draw any real conclusions. Generally they discover that they don't like the subject or don't like the subject how we teach it, or they have an illness or a personal issue that means they can't continue. I don't feel like I've heard of there being more this year. Thereafter we will lose maybe 1 or 2 people if that. For the university as a whole, throughout the pandemic (so 19/20 and 20/21 academic years) our drop out rates were lower than in previous years, only by less than 1% but our drop out rates are low anyway. This is partly attributable to the lack of other things for people who dropped out to go and do. I have not heard of any issues being raised this year but I am not doing a lot of teaching this year either.
I do know that some universities have experienced really terrible drop out rates over the past few years and, anecdotally, this year as well, but these are mainly lower ranked universities that have a higher proportion of students that would be identified as having a higher risk of dropping out and they have fewer resources to support them to not do so.