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?

@FatOaf ..i see what you mean.
I suppose what I meant was a victim of so many students now predicted or getting the very top grades, there are too many people with the grades to do a course vs the number of actual places.
So our young people are sold this belief that if you get three A or A Stars... You'll get on the course you want, when in fact it is a bit of a lottery.
It's tied to this idea its good to tell kids they can be whatever they want, they must follow their dreams, don't let anyone dare to tell them otherwise... When the real world is not like an Instagram homily.
This young man might be exceptionally bright and hard working and being told he can do whatever course at whatever uni he wants was not unreasonable except thousands of other students are being fed the same line.
Or he might well be a B grade student before 2019...but same problem. He is a victim of grade inflation.. Either his grades or the fact many other students have had their grades inflated

How do you know he's a victim of grade inflation? He might be a beneficiary of grade inflation. He might be a student who would have got As and Bs by pre-2019 standards.

Good point.

Without knowing his actual marks we won't know how he compares to his many peers with the same (inflated) grades.

This isn't a new problem. Google the name Laura Spence.

Universities which make offers based on interview & entrance exams are looking for potential, not necessarily a string of A*s at A level. Thank goodness they do or my DD would not be completing her second year at Oxford this week. I know I'm biased, but I don't think she is any less deserving of her place than anyone with 99% in each A level paper. Universities make offers to people, not just exam machines.

A few comments about not taking Maths/further Maths A levels in one sitting. This is how some schools structure it. Our inner city comp does the same thing, you can do 3 subjects at a time, so Maths is done in year 12 an sat at the end of the year and further Maths in year 13 only. The Maths/Further Maths group are separate from those doing single Maths who do it over 2 years. 50% of sixth former come from outside the school and you need an 8 or 9 to do Maths and Further Maths. It has the advantage that those who don't do as well as they had hoped in Maths in year 12 can drop the further Maths and move into one of the three single maths groups.

Universities which make offers based on interview & entrance exams are looking for potential, not necessarily a string of As at A level.*

Yes. Grades alone do not imply passion or talent for a subject.

Inflated grades, where a third of all students get As or above, are especially meaningless!

It’ll come down to personal statement. So looks like his was weaker than other peoples.

I’m a lecturer on a very popular course. We take about 8% of applicants. I reject about 70% based on their personal statement. We then interview the rest and discount more than half at interview.

applications increase every year but I have no increase in capacity on the course.

I am going to be totally honest now as DC is already at uni but I completely agree with

Teachers might have no idea how to word things for Oxford etc… because so few students ever apply there etc…. They won’t be guided as well as students from better off areas and so on.

DC was selected as part of the Cambridge outreach program. There were people from Cambridge uni who came in to the sixth form and the students were sat with other outreach students from other sixth forms in the area. They were told about a typical Cambridge style of teaching, sat through a lecture and then a tutorial. Covid happened and they didn't get the interview prep promised. However, the biggest difference was the personal statement. As per sixth form they wrote their PS with all the information from UniFrog etc. 2 days after they submitted that to college they received an email from Cambridge outreach with a completely different style and format for the PS. DC had to rewrite the entire thing. He had offers from 4 universities almost immediately but also was predicted 4 A stars.

Applicants get rejected with top grades all the time purely because more people apply than there are places for. Some you have to sit entrance exams for BMAT, MAT, STEP, LNAT, IELTS etc and there is no mention of any of that for the student in the article. We have no idea if he just achieves the grades he does or whether he has won competitions in maths or pursued whatever his subject is outside of school or not. DC did the yr12 maths then yr13 FM and sat both exams at the end of yr13. The FM adds to the maths so why wouldn't they sit it in yr13 with the rest?

I do feel for the student in the article but he is not alone, it is just unfortunate that he didn't receive an offer from the 4 he wanted but he did get an offer and from Liverpool too.

When my DDs applied for university they were told to put down an insurance university they would be prepared to go to and make sure all 5 were where you would go if need be. If students aim for so many top flight universities snd then say they don’t want the one they did get, why even include it?

Some DC don’t get great advice for high tariff universities and are not great at coping with rejection. Some schools don’t give much help for DCs and that even includes independent schools. DD pretty much worked it out for herself after her school told her not to bother.

However there is a life to be lived at other universities. A decent committed student who wants a good job after university will get one. Especially in a science subject. He can do a masters at a top university and that will be a good experience. Inflated grades help no one.

Its common on MN to see PS is not read so don’t worry about it. I think PS snd GCSEs now matter more. As they should on competitive courses where students are not interviewed.

A professor in Trinity of C said that they don't ask why you choose Trinity, why you want to study math. They don't read the PS.

Yes of course. My DC had similar predictions. We put his course in to theuniguide.co.uk and his predicted grades and it gave us some unis that made offers around that range. We did some that offer slightly higher, some around then and a banker. He got 5 offers.

A decent committed student who wants a good job after university will get one.
We are a small company who runs a small grad programme, your salary starts at £40k for the first year - a student who is keen enough to write a well-prepared application will get on the first stage of our process, that's how low our standard is!

You would be shocked by how few manage to do this, most of our applications are from the top Unis in the country. We don't look at the university, the school, or extracurricular activities, no one is interested - even at senior level. We look at the covering letter - if they can't be arsed writing a good one taking into account the job, company and industry they are applying to, if they send us the same generic covering letter the have sent 50 other companies (it's very obvious) - they get chucked in the bin...so far that has been the only thing we have needed to do to weed out the weak candidates at the application stage.

At the interview stage, we tell them the kind of interview to expect so they can prepare - they often can't even be arsed thinking of a question they'd like to ask - top tip - they don't have to think... there are loads out there, just google good questions to ask at an interview - google how to ace an interview.

If you don't know how to do something what do you normally do? You ask someone you know, the internet or an expert - in this case your careers dept. If you can't be arsed doing that much, we don't have a job for you because amongst all the other skills you will be asked to demonstrate - you will have to use initiative, be self-motivated, curious, use your research skills, have good attention to detail, and want to do the best job possible to succeed. How you approach your application demonstrates all we know of you and if lazy applications are your calling card, you won't get a great job even if you went to Oxbridge, Warwick or Imperial and all the battle over grades and universities means nothing...attitude is everything and you need to bring it when it counts. So if your kid has gone to a less prestigious uni - make sure they up their game when it comes to applying for grad jobs, we want the best but we don't believe that means Oxbridge only.

@CompoundV your post is really useful but let me tell you something quite depressing. I teach in one of top departments for my at a "top" university. Our Employability tutor (yes an academic spends valuable time in the role) regularly organises job talks. We once had quite a leading figure in our industry visiting us, and he offered to meet with our students & advise them on CVS and job application letters. These employability sessions are held when there are no scheduled lectures or seminars. Guess how many students turned up.

None.

It was so embarrassing.

@GoodThinkingMax your post does not surprise me - I got an email from a University asking me to approach their students' applications with empathy because they were not feeling very motivated to find a job or engage with their studies because they'd had a tough time with Covid, I applaud her attempt to excuse their shoddy work - but attitude is something we can and will not bend on. I'm thinking that most of these kids need another year or two to grow up - maybe raising the bar to Masters is what's needed. We're not a babysitting service.
I implore hard-working students from all universities to apply to the big name programmes - apply to the small one like us too! Don't be intimidated, don't worry if your A'levels were not amazing but you have grown up since then - we want to give you a job and we want to help you develop but you have to want that job. Do your research, there's no excuse - if you haven't gone to the "right" school or the "right" university that can help you, all the info you need is on the internet, get applying - we want evidence of your talent, not your school tie! Uni snobbery may exist with the dinosaur industries - any company with a modern, growth mentality left that behind years ago. Ask for feedback and if you are lucky enough to get it, take it on board.

@CompoundV

I’m not remotely surprised some students don’t get good jobs. My DH sifted through applications and so many don’t know what the company does! They send off the same cv everywhere. I’m aware DD1 spent a long time tailoring applications and knew any spelling mistake or poor grammar was an application binned. She also did a lot of volunteering in her chosen field and work experience too. Too many students think it’s only the degree that matters. Plenty more matters!

A generic degree at a middling university is ok but you will need to nail a lot more to get an interview. History at number 60 in the league tables won’t give you much of a head start. Unfortunately talent resides in the high tariff universities. If DC won’t work, then why would they be great in a job? What talents have they got that motivated bright kids don’t have in spades? University doesn’t always matter but those who go to the top ones do earn more. An undisputed fact. Mainly because they get through all the selection tests for jobs with aplomb and don’t make silly mistakes on applications. Plus they have researched what they need to do and get on with it.,

@User11010866 well obviously I don’t speak for all universities but a lot put a lot of weight on personal statements. I care about them more than grades to be honest

The students from the high tariff universities send in the shit applications too - for the last batch I looked at from a high tariff Uni out of 35 - I only interviewed five, only one went to 2nd interview - the students from the lower tariff unis has made much more of an effort - actually did a small amount of research and were not arrogant enough to believe a big name uni would get them a job - one of them got the job.

We don't expect our candidates to have any prior work or volunteer experience related to the field we work in - it makes no difference, they do have to have experience of something though, not just academics - they have to be able to talk about how they work with people but that can be from an unrelated volunteer experience, hobbies, school clubs, summer job, it really doesn't matter, a bit of volunteer experience will suggest they are keen but so will a well-written covering letter.

Sometimes I can find volunteering on a CV a bit of a turn-off, like the World Challenge nonsense - especially if I feel it was done to put it on a CV...it feels a bit self-serving - I'm not saying I'd reject them on that basis but in the words of Shania Twain - it don't impress me much.

We expect them to be excellent communicators, very strong numerically - we'll test for that, so we won't reject a non-numerate degree, and great collaborators - self-aware and low on arrogance and ego (we see a lot of that maybe some companies like it but it doesn't fit with our culture). I'm sure people will disagree with me it can be very subjective.

The grades are probably more critical than the PS for the STEM subjects. For example, in the engineering subject class, if the students don't know how to add fractions, how to expect them to understand the Fourier and Laplace transform which are basics for some subjects. Only passion is not enough.

My son applied to Durham for a AAB course he liked the look of when his predictions were AAA. They rejected him for that course but offered him a place on a AAA course (same department, but different course focus) that he'd already researched and decided he didn't want. He didn't accept the offer!

Woody Allen was once asked why he did so well. He said I show up (i.e he isn't late, he keeps going, he does the work, arrives when he says). Lots of people don't do that, don't turn up for interviews, don't read the instructions etc. If you can make sure you do what is asked like a few applicants to CompoundV you are already ahead of the game.

mind you in law (my field) loads of applicants do everything required have stellar grades even from sink schools and still don't get in because there are massive numbers of applicatns for jobs where you are on £40k when training, 2 years later £80k -100k when qualified and potentially on £1m a year in a few of the best firms if ever made a partner so quite a few people are chasing that kind of money.

Totally unrelated because we do know it is tough this year but interested to know what state school in Portsmouth Daniel is attending. I thought it was all college not sixth form on Portsea !

I think that in any walk of life, if you're in competition, nothing is certain. You have to focus on how the competition is sieved, whether by entrance tests, interviews, PS, and invest in that. When you rely at least in part on another party's consent to embark on a venture, there's really no point in complaining "it wasn't fair". They wanted someone else because they were better, and it may not be because you weren't good enough. There's always next year or the next course or the next job, when you should yourself have become more competitive and resilient.