Pls can any Oxford tutors answer a question

[Questionforthedons]

For the written work submission as part of entrance, what is the point of it?

How does it genuinely show you what a student is capable of? Is it very open to being falsified and why does it need to show the school teachers marking comments?

For example if a teacher marks higher than the Oxford tutors consider the piece of work deserves do they then doubt the predicted grades?

Thank you for any insights.

Different subject tutors would probably give different answers, but here is one…

The point is to see how well a candidate writes - can they develop and sustain an argument, select and use evidence to support it, etc. If the written work is incoherent or poorly written, but has been selected by the candidate as their best work to date, that is alarming in terms of someone’s ability to cope with an essay-heavy course.

Of course we have to take the information given on trust, ie that it is the candidate’s own work and was done in the circumstances they say it was, but the original marking and school sign off help with that. Just as schools are trusted to write references and indeed to invigilate public exams, so too we assume that if a teacher signs to say “yes Freddie did this as part of homework for my class, it was based on 1 class discussion and I gave him a week” they are unlikely to be lying. The marking also helps an assessor understand what the teacher was looking for when the piece was set, which gives a sense of the context and aims of the work.

We don’t care what mark the teacher gave it as their mark scheme is potentially very different. For example it is not uncommon for a teacher to give full marks for a piece of work because it ticks every box on the A level criteria - that would simply not happen at university. They are marking to specific criteria and we are not trying to replicate them. It doesn’t make us doubt the predicted grade as teachers know the A Level mark scheme far better than us - it is not our place to question that. We are are assessing according to our own judgement of the overall effectiveness of the piece of academic writing (taking into account its context, time allowed, etc - what you can expect of a 30 minute timed piece in exam conditions is obviously going to be different from what you can expect for an essay someone had weeks to write).

It is only one piece of evidence, but the more types of evidence we have the more nuanced judgement we can make.

I'm not an Oxford tutor but I went to Oxford.

There would be absolutely no point in cheating/falsifying. The written submission gives a quick insight into the applicant's thought processes and how they develop ideas. If they are selected for interview the conversation will include discussing the topic of the work submitted. The interviewers, surprisingly, are not thick. They would immediately spot if the person speaking to them is not the original author of the work submitted and isn't able to explain and expand upon the process of creating it. It would be like submitting someone else's demo tape to a music agent in order to get an audition opportunity when you don't have any musical talent yourself - what would you imagine the result of the audition would be if someone did that?

I agree with the above posters. The point is that it gives an insight into what the candidate’s work will be like if they got in, and shows how they think.

i did medicine, so most of the undergraduate stuff is scientific. Even so, pretty much all our tutorial work was essay based - we’d have 3 or 4 essays per week, one for each tutor, which would demonstrate what we had distilled from our reading about whatever topic we were covering that week. As above, it would require us to make a cogent argument, backed up with the pertinent evidence. It would then get picked apart in the next tutorial.

We had one of the more heavily scheduled courses, having to fit the reading and essays around daily labs, dissections, lectures and tutorials, so being able to easily write well was a definite asset.

That’s all interesting thank you