High grade students being rejected. Is this fair?

[mids2019]

www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jun/11/first-post-covid-school-leavers-face-fight-for-fewer-university-places

Is.this situation going to continue if we don't have grade deflation. Are more universities going to be forced to interview or to require supplementary exams?

I understand where you're coming from but some firms do care which university you've been to, particularly in professional services such as investment banking and management consultancy. There was a very limited range of universities represented when I worked in corporate finance.

Yes, people get in from other universities but some firms also use the university as an easy filter (in their mind at least). Some of the accountancy firms are going for more of a Uni blind/initial testing approach but this isn't the case everywhere. I think there's inevitably some generational bias as partners/directors recruiting are influenced by which universities had the best reputation when they were undergraduates.

I have to totally agree with this, it's a very old fashioned approach and definitely has changed/is changing (the conservative professions like Law and Banking will always be the last to modernise).

I work in IT Sales and the company I work for look at any grad with at least a 2:1. Some of the highest earning ones a few years later, of the top of my head, when to places like Oxford Brooks, Bournemouth, Nottingham Uni and Swansea. They don't care about RG, ex Poly etc. The only Oxbridge people are people older than me. As I've seen this first hand I'm advising my dc to avoid the very top tier places in terms of entrance requirements. I come from that background too and it honestly wasn't all that. The pastoral side was shocking (long time ago but still).

I'm really against using more interviews as it just disadvantages disadvantaged students even further.

I only have my own experience but I couldn't disagree more about this.
I went to a truly dreadful school, my grades were good for the course but not straight As.
I think I got my very competitive place because I got half an hour to talk about my passion.
All the involvement I had in relevant local projects, how I saved my educational grant to travel further afield during the summer for other projects.
The things I could see from bedroom window that were linked to the course.
I was truly passionate about the course and had an opportunity to show that, school grades didn't show that. This was well before contextual offers were a thing.

Being predicted A grades does not guarantee offers. I had predicted straight As 25 years ago but I didn’t get an offer from every institution. The boy cited in the article had an offer for Liverpool but rejected it despite it being an excellent RG university 🤷🏻‍♀️

I also agree that Liverpool is a perfectly decent University so this dc actually had a place that they could have used.

Speaking as a former Russell Group STEM admissions tutor, we are well aware that some schools teach Maths in Y12 and FM in Y13. The letter from the school should have indicated this and in any case the admissions team will have inferred it from the pattern of exams. I cannot imagine that this would be a reason for the rejections. It is beyond the candidate’s control. Many pupils are admitted to the universities under discussion with only three ALs.

I agree it may be significant that the candidate’s results on the university- specific admissions exams were (apparently - I have not read the article) discussed.

I think this is not so much the case anymore

I think there's inevitably some generational bias as partners/directors recruiting are influenced by which universities had the best reputation when they were undergraduates. In general they no longer know which university a candidate attended...that information is removed from the application.

Dare I say this problem has more to do with grade inflation - we just don't seem to be able to stop increasing the number of As every year.

He had A stars in his predictions.

Dare I say this problem has more to do with grade inflation - we just don't seem to be able to stop increasing the number of As every year.

Of course! There's hundreds if not thousands of students predicted 4 A stars. How can we differentiate between them?!

Additional assessments and interviews are absolutely necessary!

Kind of obvious. A level shows level of ‘knowledge attained’ which works as a minimum required for certain jobs or training courses. But it is not v good for top unis and employers who want to find the top x%. A simple way of doing this would be giving 2 grades: the current A-E plus a percentile grade for A and A - so you could tell the difference between A* 97 percentile and 99.5 percentile - note these do NOT correspond to scoring 99.5% in an exam, rather that this candidate’s score is better than 99.5% of people in that year who sat that exam.

Sadly this young man is a victim of the ridiculous grade inflation....and so many students now have 3 A or 3 A*s so of course they cannot all do the courses they want at uni.
The Unis have no further way bar interviewing everyone for every place, of differentiating students, so i guess base offers of places on personal statements and school references.
Either that or we will soon start having A**

I have been discussing this a lot lately at home with DD and DSD both applying or recently applied for medicine.
DD got offers of A*AA and did get a place
DSD applying now and offers likely to be AA A

when i applied 35 yrs ago it was BBB ( and in those days three Bs was considered a very good result)

so are students no so much cleverer than we were 35 yrs ago ?
are exams so much easier ?

and how one earth are admissions tutors able to work out who has the passion /drive etc for a course if they do not interview ?

But not in all of them, I think.

STEM at Oxford is surely 3 x A stars and most will have 4

I'm always surprised how 'easy' it is to get an A star. It does not require a student to get almost 100% of the questions correct - often getting 'just' 70% correct yields the top grade?!

How can you then differentiate between a student who is a genius and gets 99% or 100% correct vs lots of other students who just 'scrape' an A star with 60% or 70%?

Uni snobbery is a real thing in some industries. My DN is doing civil engineering. She had applied for architecture but changed her mind by the time her Alevel results were through. She had applied to a northern Uni ( ex poly) because a number of her friends were going there. After considering her options she went through clearing and landed a place at the top Russell group Uni for the course she wanted. She has just landed a paid internship with Balfour Beatty for her year in industry. If she performs well this is likely to lead to a guaranteed job at the end of her course.
When looking at Universities it is useful to see where all the research funding is going. These universities attract the best postgrads and teaching staff. Oxford and Cambridge have lost the top spots in many areas.
We are in the process of looking at courses and unis with DS who is in yr12. Advice coming from school is that due to Covid many are faking to get places because so many have deferred in the last two years. The advice is to defer or go through clearing. DS has had a tough time over the last 6mnths and his predicted grades don’t reflect his ability. School are unwilling to bump them and we don’t want them to. We don’t know whether DS will actually improve on them, although we hope he will.
He still has no idea what he wants to do so we are encouraging him to take a year out to work, hopefully he will refocus and be able to make a more informed decision after he has experienced the real world.
Also he can build up some savings. As a bit of incentive we are going to offer to pay tuition fees so he doesn’t end up in perpetual debt. We haven’t told him yet though.
I don’t really care what work he does, he just needs to find a work ethic.

Faking should read failing

How do you know your dd would not have got the industrial placement had she gone to a non-Russell Group Uni?

Applications are not based on grades alone. There are also school references, personal statements, widening access, and sometimes additional exams or interviews to help differentiate between applicants.

The young man in the article might have the grades but may have simply not had a strong enough personal statement, school reference or interview compared to other candidates.

My son got 5 offers. His predictions are lower (BBC) so we ruled out the RG unis. He's going to a top ten course in his field (film production). There are courses at " better" unis which score much lower than my son's course, but which require far higher grades (eg York requires AAA). Makes no sense to me.

It’s a shame these Unis can’t use all that tuition money to expand and teach more students.

Are you being serious? Surely you comment is a wind up?

You know very little about university funding - current tuition fees don't cover the costs of most degree programmes.

To see what a degree actually costs, have a look at the fees charged to overseas undergrads.

@Namenic , @pinklavenders and others,

Although I suspect @pinklavenders may be off in some of her grade boundaries, I appreciate the principle you have both raised. It is a rare case where I agree with this government, in that they are considering a new grade of A double star. At least, they were. I haven’t heard anything lately.

Of course if grade inflation persists we will simply be adding another star every few years. Hardly optimal, but better than nothing. I would prefer to see some kind of numerical data reported, probably centiles.

I am aware of an issue where some Uni’s are taking in more foreign students for the inflated amounts they pay as the uni’s need the money after the past few years with less income.

Then you should be aware that the quota for our overseas student recruitment gas no impact on the quota for domestic/Home students.

And that the full tuition fees that overseas students pay substantially subsidise your DC's education costs. Home/domestic student fees don't cover the full cost of most degree programmes.

I should add that my thinking is not elitist, although it may first appear to be. Rather, it would give pupils and their parents or carers an honest picture of where they stand compared to others, and to the expectations for their course. At present I think some part of the underperformance/MH problems amongst undergraduates worrying virtually all staff who deal with them is the unrealistic view of themselves students have simply because their AL grades are high compared to previous generations.

Of course if grade inflation persists we will simply be adding another star every few years. Hardly optimal, but better than nothing. I would prefer to see some kind of numerical data reported, probably centiles.

Yes, why not rank all students doing the same exam? That way those achieving 99% will rank much higher than those achieving 72%? That seems much fairer than giving both the same grade, an A star?!