DS wants to drop out of Oxford - and it's largely my fault

[Distressedstudent]

My DS is a fresher at Oxford and not enjoying it one bit - the intensive work load, the lack of contact hours, the general 'nerdiness' of it. He had wanted to go to York but, as he was predicted (and got) 4 x A star, we urged him to apply to Oxford (where we went - he had no intention of applying) and then, when he got his offer, to firm it. He very reluctantly agreed after talking to his teachers who said he'd be nuts to turn down Oxford, even though his heart was set on York.

He sees his friends from school having a blast at other universities whereas he has his nose to the grind at Oxford. He is now planning to see his Director of Studies and to see if York will take him from September (to read the same humanities course). He is not interested in my advice as DH and I 'got it wrong' and gave him 'duff advice' (his words).

I am not sure if I am up to replying to anyone kind enough to offer their thoughts because I feel so miserable/disappointed/guilty on his behalf.

Surely if that were the case @goodbyestranger no candidates holding offers would miss their A Level grades?

BadgersStripes one of my DSs missed their A level grades and it was only an AAA offer (History). He was also at a top grammar. He had his Oxford offer confirmed through UCAS before he went to school to collect his results. I said he should phone or email Oxford and check that this wasn't an admin mistake (he would have missed clearing opportunities because he also missed his Bristol grades). The Oxford college was absolutely clear they had made no admin error and wanted him. By the time he got back home there was a letter in the post saying just that ('Although you narrowly missed your grades we are pleased etc'). He had a fabulous time at Oxford - lots of sport, lots of social stuff and graduated with a First. I think they do tend to know what they're doing (even if Rejects has an issue with that).

He's at a Magic Circle law firm now and the partners in his final interview did quiz him on his B. That lasted all of a minute then they moved on. Kids miss grades and older clever successful people have done it themselves - there are more important things to judge potential by (evidence of a creative mind at interview being the obvious one).

My DM wanted me to apply to Oxford like my sibling but I am the same. I was and am quite lazy but good at passing exams. She still doesn't understand why I didn't try but I understood early on that it would not have suited me. That said, I might have made a different degree choice with a bit more wisdom and maturity, which was somewhat lacking at 18.

You have a lot more info than that!

Not a lot. There are aptitude tests in some subjects which are a useful but imperfect predictor. The UCAS forms include (as I'm sure you know): achieved and predicted grades, personal statement, reference, so I was including all of that. But much of it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt and/or doesn't really discriminate. They will have more than one interview, but each tutor only observes one. We also have "contextual" information, but it is unclear exactly how that should best be used.

I doubt that anybody involved in recruitment for a job or course can hand in heart say they are confident they always found the best person from all the applicants. There are a lot of unknowns.

Overall, though, I tend to be pretty confident in the ones we do take. (They do seem to do pretty well, if I say so myself

Yes, but what about the ones you/we don't take? I'm fairly sure that some of those would have done pretty well too!

I don’t actually understand what you’re saying here. I went to a northern comp. It was v good. Got me the same grades as people who’d paid for a very expensive education. Not sure how you’re managing to read that as a criticism of northern comps.

@ClimbingRoseBush
You seemed to be saying you were at a huge disadvantage because you went to a northern Comp. Why mention it at all? Unless you thought you were worse off. You were not. Or was it just another them and us jibe we see here all the time? As you can see, school attended might make little difference in the selection process.

Well if by us versus them you mean class consciousness and an awareness that private schools are largely privileged people embedding that privilege by trying to buy better education for their kids then yes, it was us versus them. My point, to the extent that I had one, was actually that I wasn’t at a huge disadvantage, my education was fine.

Hmm. Almirante was class based. Thought so.

mast0650 you're saying something slightly different now. I expressed scepticism about your statement that tutors can't identify 'Oxbridge material' (for want of a better phrase) from the information available to them. That's not really credible with the right interview questions and technique. It's also not the same as always selecting the absolute best without exception.

Some of my own DC have certainly been interviewed more than once by the same tutor. So much varies between college and subject, but it clearly is a thing for some colleges/ subjects. Not a very important thing. though.

Do the Oxbridge tutors on this thread think that some subjects may be harder to select for than others?

@goodbyestranger You do just seem bizarrely determined to defend Oxford’s infallibility at all costs; it’s marvellous they spotted the genius of each of your eight (?) children but when you hear people involved in admissions confess the system is faulty (not a disaster, just imperfect) you get very defensive. No one is saying your brilliant children didn’t fully deserve places, they’re saying sometimes great candidates are missed and unsuitable ones are picked in their place. Sometimes. Just as we all know sometimes the wrong job candidate is picked (except by you).

From my days at C I KNOW there were some students (a minority but a notable one) who just shouldn’t have been there, because they weren’t up to the course. I’ve said before my friend who teaches (doesn’t select though he’d love to) at O says in a cohort of 10 typically one is outstanding, seven good, the last two - he had no idea how they got there. Every other year at least (it’s becoming more common) someone drops out, like the OP’s son. This infuriates him because they’ve taken a place someone else would have dearly loved and he wishes there was more screening of students’ motivation and general robustness (ie many leave quoting homesickness - fine, but perhaps they should have chosen a uni close to home), so situations like this didn’t happen regularly frequently. Not that I blame the OP at all, she understandably wanted what she saw as the best for her ds, and I really hope he is happy elsewhere

I think citing homesickness is another way of saying they don’t fit in. They would prefer to be at home because it’s familiar but somewhere else is less intense and that is important for some too. Some worry they are not good enough and compare themselves with the brilliant ones. They Lise confidence. I think it’s inevitable this happens from time to time but as Oxford don’t give out many 2:2s, and do have a low drop out rate, I suspect most dc are fine. They don’t have 20% with 2:2 and they have more than 10% with firsts.

My dd missed a grade and wasn’t given a second chance. However I’m not going to say I think it’s made much difference to her life. At the time I thought it would, and I was wrong. She did want to go when she got her place but I was aware she was becoming unsure. Her choral scholarship went down too. So going elsewhere won’t close doors for decent grads.

In the interests of balance, I should point out that I was rejected from Oxford twice and the world has studiously ignored my genius in the intervening decades.

! However I do know what @ForeverbyJudyBlume means. One guy who did get in for History from my school over me did so because during the interview a question happened to come up that had been raised by his teacher in preps for it, and it was a massive coincidence. I'm not just being bitter when I say he was Mr No Personality and hardly a stellar candidate (not just my view but that of my mate at the time who did get a place at Oxford to study PPE). I did feel like a twat offering him all kind of advice on the process however as this was my second time of applying, it's that classic thing where you look back and think, well, maybe I should have played my cards closer to my chest.

Certainly at Bristol Uni I have never met such thick people, not all of them of course, but some were unfathomable, like nothing I've encountered before or since, not even in the lowliest place of work. I had a theory some tutors like this as they don't see it as a threat or something.

DD's Oxford course doesn't have an admissions test, instead there's a base line of 10 or 8 grade 8/9 GCSEs (depending on school). He tutor says the top 10% just stand out at interview as do the bottom 10% and the rest are a bit of a lottery. Of these, he chooses those who might be interesting to teach and the "busy" students as they tend to cope better with the workload.

ForeverbyJudyBlume blimey. It's not all about me nor have I made it so. I'd prefer that you didn't. I simply said to the poster who is apparently a tutor that it's pretty meh if they can't work out who's up to Oxford/ Cambridge with all the info they have to hand plus at least two interviews. It's dead weird to bang on about other people's DC.

@tortoiseshellpeppershoes if top grades tell you nothing and some subjects don't have admissions tests then that puts a lot of power in the interview. If that is the case it begs the question why Oxbridge is in the minority of universities that haven't managed to get back to having them in person.

Yes (having read your full post now), you've put a lot of words into my mouth there ForeverbyJudyBlume including some batshit notion that I reckon my kids are all genius. Not a single one is a genius nor would I want any to be nor have I ever ever said any one was or even implied it. Frankly I think being genius would be an absolute curse. It would be good not to come on here and impute rubbish to other posters. Cheers.

You didn’t say your children were geniuses, that was my inference. You do,however, come across as a bit of an Oxbridge know-all on the basis of these children’s attendance at Oxford and seem to dislike any suggestion it’s less than perfect. I’d politely suggest that while it is a great institution it is nonetheless fallible. I’d also suggest no institution that selects on anything apart from straight exam results (which obviously would also be problematic) be it a university or an employer can get it right 100 per cent of the time. A long list of deeply unimpressive captains of industry, politicians and my own Oxbridge contemporaries would show as much

No, you’re misunderstanding— it’s not that top grades tell us nothing; they do, just not the whole picture. We look at grades and the application form, school reference, pre-interview test scores, submitted work (2-4 pieces), and a whole lot of school/LEA/national comparison data, data on the applicant’s contextual background, and so on. Then two interviews. And the overall picture is made up of all those variables.

Exam grades are looked at not just in the school context (this gives us the school’s relative achievement on a range of benchmarks), but also compared to the school overall achievement (eg. what percentile is that GCSE score within the school). As well as the raw score, we also get an adjusted score with the candidate’s exams adjusted for school weighting, too.

Great exam grades from a mediocre school will be a hell of a lot more impressive than from Eton or Marlborough - where we’ll be specifically looking at the work and the test papers to see if the grades are corroborated by the written work.

The interview is just one part of the picture. No decisions are made just on the interview, and sometimes candidates with great interview performances are rejected because other parts of the application are a bit shaky. The opposite is also true. We’re looking across a whole lot of different aspects of the candidate, not just one or two.

Bear in mind that most of us also spend a lot of our time assessing and interviewing postgraduate applications for Masters and PhD courses, as well as assessing postdoctoral proposals, fellowship awards, sitting on job panels for posts from postdoc awards to professorships, and many of us also manage and interview non-academic staff. A very large percentage of our time is basically assessing applicants and applications at all sorts of levels and for all sorts of student and professional roles — to a degree that I don’t think non-academics quite realise how much it’s a part of the job.

Just adding to @tortoiseshellpeppershoes' great summary - when we evaluate students/applicants/colleagues, we're evaluating on the basis of the information we have, at that time, using our best judgement. A group of very promising students at age 17 may thoroughly deserve their places. By age 40, they may have made all sorts of choices. Pinning elite political failure on the people who do admissions seems a bit much. A whole range of institutions and socialisation processes have had their effect by then.

"Oxbridge is in the minority of universities that haven't managed to get back to having them in person"

I think Oxbridge is in the minority in interviewing at all? DD was interviewed by C but otherwise not by the others except a cursory interview (online) by Manchester

Who does interview now?! Besides medical school and Oxbridge? If we wanted to ration our places, we would just lift the grade tariff. And RGs don't really want to ration places. We just create more places and hire more temporary lecturers.

DD has an Oxford offer. We've been really impressed by the amount of information on line about the application process and it has felt 'fair'.
Long gone are the days when a reference name dropped and cited nepotism.

So from a state comprehensive with little local private competition, DD got very strong GCSEs not perfect but probably top five definitely ten out of 200 kids.

She's been the clever kid putting her hand up in class for years but A-levels have meant really getting to know the teachers, lending and borrowing books, watching extra videos. There is her and another girl who are the benchmark for the top marks.

The Oxford admission policy really seemed to take all aspects of DDs education in context and her teachers feel she'll really enjoy the tutor style teaching because she is that kid in class.

There's no special uni guidance. When DD applied we used a post from Mumsnet to help with the personal statement, blog posts on UCAS, then she got on with the rest because if she can't work out how to do the online assessment then she'll never cope with the actual workload.
For the interview, the head of English tried to help but they ended up chatting about books featuring Oxford, the deputy head talked about Manchester Uni.

If your kid is somewhere that regularly sends multiple kids across lots of subjects I hope this helps you understand how much extra effort these sole kids from distant schools have to make to just to get to the UCAS stage.
I think JK Rowling has made gown wearing and formals seem fun and do able to kids who's academic life has been more Grange Hill than St Trinian's.

I'd like to thank all the uni staff that crop up on these boards and really helped. The online interviews were great, kept it in perspective and no overnight and solitary travel logistics to sort.
I really hope she enjoys Uni and Oxford enjoys having her.

ForeverbyJudyBlume well maybe you should check back a bit to where I said I'm distinctly unstarry eyed about Oxford because you were way over the top, also to all the many other posts where I fail to claim my kids are anything special.

mast0650 you're saying something slightly different now. I expressed scepticism about your statement that tutors can't identify 'Oxbridge material' (for want of a better phrase) from the information available to them.

I said that they can't do it perfectly, which is entirely consistent with what I have said since. I was also slightly poking fun at the whole "Oxbridge material" notion - as if it was a fundamentally different material from any other.

You did use the word perfect tbf. mast0650. My quibble was solely with the idea (in that same post) that you can't judge who would manage fine at/ benefit form Oxford on the basis of the information you have to hand once interviews are complete. You definitely implied you had a paucity of evidence, but you don't really.