Best unis for maths

[Dangermouse999]

DS is in y12 and we’re looking at going to some uni open days.

He’s planning to apply for Maths and is probably on track to get 4 A stars in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Comp Sci.

He's considering the following:

1st tier: Cambridge/Oxford, Warwick
2nd tier: Bath, St Andrews, Durham, maybe Edinburgh and Bristol
3rd tier: Exeter, Lancaster, Southampton, Loughborough.

He prefers a smaller to medium size town, definitely not London and he's not a big partying kind of person.

Does anyone have any experience of these unis / other suggestions / any advice in general for Maths degrees?

I thought Loxbridge was bad enough but Woxbridgeperialhamdrews takes the biscuit!!

We could of course be inclusive with it. I'm sure there's plenty of ham to go around.

I have one at Bristol and one in Oxbridge. A huge percentage of the Bristol child’s cohort is from private school, especially in some halls. There are relatively few non-white faces. A huge shock after growing up in London. The one at Oxbridge has mostly state educated friends of a far more diverse cultural background. It was quite a surprise for us to hear about.

And Bristol university is in no way a campus!! It’s a great city and my child loves it. But it’s not a campus.

Bristol isn't even in the top 10 unis with the highest proportion of private school pupils. Presumably your child would have had a panic attack if they had gone to Exeter, St Andrews or heaven forbid, Durham LOL!

Even Oxford still has a significantly higher proportion of private school students versus Bristol (31% vs 24%).

I was just sharing my own child’s personal experience. Thought it might be of interest. Not sure I needed the sarcastic response but ok.

You said 'a huge percentage' of your child’s cohort is from private school' which is a bit of an exaggeration compared to many Russell Group unis.

Bristol's private school intake is only a few percentage points higher than lower middle to low ranked Russell Group unis like Newcastle, Leeds and Nottingham.

Hope all our aspiring mathematicians enjoyed the UK maths challenge yesterday. DS is confident he got all the first 20 right but didn’t do all of the last 5. He thinks that won’t be enough to go onto the Olympiad but we will see.

doh! I forgot to ask DS how that had gone in amongst everything else that he’s juggling atm!

DS scored over the BMO 1 qualifying threshold by quite a margin in some practice papers but said yesterday’s paper was a bit harder than expected on the last few questions.

So maybe the qualifying score might be nearer to 80% as in some past years rather than close to 90% like last year?

Anyone know when SMC answers are published?

They are on the UK MT site now.

There are very good video clips of each question followed by a person explaining how they solved it on YouTube.