UCAS will show actual grades accepted by unis soon?

[Trulytotallyme]

I read the above on here (don’t ask me where!) and think it will start this autumn? This would have been a great for my niece - she took all the offer grades at face value so ended up firming Leicester (ABB) and insuring Reading (BBB). She got ABB and is now on a planned year out and due to go to Leicester in Sept. However, she reckons she could have been accepted by Newcastle (her first choice) who offered her AAB but she turned down as she was (accurately - as it turns out) predicted ABB.

Are you pleased that UCAS will be showing actual A-level grades achieved by the students they accept? Great for our DC but I imagine some universities won’t be! How will it all pan out two or three years down the line - will universities that currently publish far higher entry grades than they actually take be bounced into being more transparent (they will look silly if not I think)? Works both ways of course - Oxbridge want AAA or A star AA but most entrants have three (or more) A stars.

Did you read it anywhere else or only on Mumsnet?

It will vary though year on year because there are still only x number of places for y number of students. So one year uni A will have AAA as lowest offered, uni B will be AAB and uni C ABB, so next year lots of people insure uni C, uni B then doesn't get as many applicants so then goes down to ABB or ABC, uni C then is less popular the next year as everyone rushes back to uni B. If students are strategic it will be an advantage, however looking at medicine applications often students are not strategic and apply to the unis they want, and to be honest for most students and most degrees they need to look at the modules which will suit them and that they will enjoy the most.

It's a good idea. Not as good as a complete overhaul of the system so that students apply only after they have their results but an improvement none the less.

UCAS published a report in January of 2023 stating it. Am crap at links but do Google. It’s called ‘The future of undergraduate admissions’

Agree 100%. I think it is appalling that unis try to hoodwink students and make out that they are a high status institution when they actually accept bang average grades

But aren’t they publishing a 3 or 5 year profile of accepted grades? That will mitigate against your scenario?

As a former admissions tutor I also support a move to post results applications. There are several ways it could be done. Lots of admissions teams have thought about how, sometimes in great detail!

Having said that I also agree with @ThatsNiceVeryNice that this move will represent a big step in the right direction

But surely the contextualisation of offers will totally muddy things anyway? Most universities offer two grades lower, some even drop three grades, and some have very extensive qualification criteria. So for non contextual applicants, the reporting will be rather misleading, as it is on whatever that website is that posters often recommend for finding out average student grades held

Yes, @Revengeofthepangolins but come August in a bad year standards change anyway.

I am away from admissions now but I think the % of contextual offers is available. Without knowing precisely what they are you cannot compute the true average noncontextual accepted grades, but you can get pretty close, from knowing the % of contextual offers and the expected drop in grades of those offers

+1 for applications post results, which would eradicate predicted grade inflation and make the application process a more level playing field.

Similar info is already available on "DiscoverUni" (which holds all the student satisfaction data too). For each course you can look at "Entry Information" and it tells you what percentage of intake had how many UCAS points.

uniguide.co.uk is useful too.

Enter the subject and location, find the relevant course at the relevant university and then drill down into it.

It shows a lot of statistics for the course - two ones I find useful being:

1. % of UK vs % of International students taking course.

1. Most popular A Levels studied and grades achieved.

@bguthb90 The only warning is that "UniGuide" lumps small courses together into areas. This can be a problem if you're researching a tiny course! (e.g. my DD's specialised design course has 90% student satisfaction and above-average-for-field graduate salary, but it shows as 70% and below-average-for-field on UniGuide by being lumped together with all the art/design courses...)

@PhotoDad - ok, I wasn't aware of that. I was using it last week to check the courses my son has applied for, together with similar ones available on Extra.

All Finance or Accounting related and I found exact matches for all of them in uniguide.

@bguthb90 I think the moral of the story is to use all available sources! And for anyone else following this thread, it's really only an issue for teeny-tiny specialised courses (which are all lumped together for league tables, too).

OP, can you help me understand why it would have been great for your niece. She'd still have had an AAB offer from Newcastle and she'd still have missed the offer, isn't that right? If Newcastle are actually accepting students with much lower offers than the ones they give out, why wouldn't they have given your niece ABB in that case, rather than miss out on a good student who goes elsewhere?

The UCAS approach is the same. This is available to UCAS Advisers within schools already and has been for a couple/few years now. It shows the spread of grades as a % and does not specifically state which are contextual grades.I don't think it is any big secret that (ignoring pandemic grades) predicted grades were only 17% accurate. Indeed if anything the pandemic grades will actually inflate the% of higher grades. So ot wont actually be that useful if these recent years skew the 5 year figure.

Will the "grades of those actually accepted" indicate whether other people with the same grades were also rejected?

Suppose you're a university course and you've made offers of AAB. Not as many have made the offer as there are places, so you then consider the near misses. But you might well only offer places to some of those with ABB.
If you'd offered ABB in the first place, you might have ended up with more students than you had places for.

They could record that course as actually having given places to people with ABB, but is it not fairer to say that their offer is AAB - there might be a chance with ABB, but it's not something people can rely on.

@AmberEars Universities know that their standard offers will affect how good a university they are perceived to be. So universities that are not top of the academic pecking order may prefer to keep their standard offers on the higher side and then admit students who don't meet the terms of the offer. My own DS was one grade below the offer for two of his A levels and was still accepted by his insurance choice. Obviously not all universities need to play that game. If it's (say) Warwick or Durham asking for A stars, I would work on the assumption that they really mean it.

Actual grades accepted are already on Uniguide. I think some people just aren't aware of the data out there.

To the poster whose DD/DN missed out on Newcastle - she missed out because she wasn't advised properly. It's common knowledge that most universities barring the most selective ones/courses will take students who drop a grade on results day so what she should've done is firm Newcastle and put Leicester as her insurance.

This is where parents can really help with advice but a lot of people believe parents should stay out and the young person should navigate the whole process by themselves. Problem is they are not informed enough to know how the system works.