Oxford to drop PAT, MAT, TSA, etc

[Muu9]

https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/applying-to-oxford/guide/admissions-tests

Thoughts? I think it's a bad move for physics, as the time-pressured nature ESAT simply isn't very good at spotting the deep thinkers most physics programs look for.

The prices as they are already out off most students, which is fine since Imperial (or Oxbridge for that matter) do not need a very large number of international students. So surely raising prices a bit more wouldn't cause demand to crash?
As an example, I recently saw an international student with an 87 PAT get rejected pre-interview from Oxford engineering. Surely if the course is this competitive, Oxford could afford to increase engineering foreign fees until foreign demand falls to a reasonable level?

If universities want to choose their international students among a large, well qualified pool of those able to pay (good) rather than merely taking those qualified and willing to pay the very highest fees (bad), current policy is fine.

Ceramiq, a decade ago but DD's central London school sent masses to Imperial. The impression was that there was positive discrimination in favour of Brits. Imperial had so many well qualified overseas applicants that the good British applicant stood out. So the one in her friendship group who was counted as an overseas student was the only one not to get a place, and went to UCL instead.

Most would say the level is already more than reasonable!

The objective is not to take only the richest of the highly able students, or to price some out of a British education.

Rejections are complex and won’t be based on one component.

Sorry, @Muu9 , my first thought was badly phrased because I was rushed. I was thinking that Overseas tuition fees level is more than reasonable.

I don’t see a problem with having lots of applicants. It introduces some randomness which isn’t ideal, but it is better than restricting access to the richest.

Interesting. The freedom of information re teacher in the family was for Oxford. There may be ones for Durham, Warwick or Cambridge too - I'll have a look!

I'm not a teacher, and my kids have not (yet) sat any of these tests.

But in principle, perhaps a test that is not so curriculum dependent is a good thing? I mean, applicants already have the top grades so you would have to rely on that for the subject knowledge at institutions such as Oxford.

But if admissions then want to admit the true talent from that pool, then a test that does not rely on 'learnt' material to the same extent as perhaps the PAT (from reading on here), is presumably a good thing?

Nowadays, it is much easier to 'teach to the test' than ever before. As I've mentioned before, some of the students I've seen going to Oxford are 'perfect 9/A*' student but honestly - and work very, very hard - but some of them are not what I always thought of as Oxford 'standard' - i.e. the real novel thinkers with depth.

Didn't know that the PAT was actually written by the Physics department at Oxford! Who would actually be involved with writing these questions and how do we know they're not leaked?

I agree that aiming to construct a test that is independent of curriculum is good.

Oxford wrote PAT; Cambridge and Imperial write ESAT. I have never heard of any leaks on the academic side. It would defeat the purpose of the test. Why should Oxford be different to Cambridge and Imperial?

The security problems have been with the administration of various admissions tests by Pearson VUE. The only one I am aware of whose content Pearson may bear some responsibility for is the Pearson Test of English. Unsurprisingly, test takers on social media generally regard it as easier than IELTS and it is less widely accepted internationally than IELTS/TOEFL. A little while back there was such a bad security breach that Edinburgh refused all PTE results from one worldwide sitting.

The reason Pearson’s security breaches bother me is that from what I understand they result from doing things cheaply. If they would get their act together - and improve the cumbersome bursary system - they could potentially be fine.

I think part of the reason why STEP is a good predictor is that students have more time to prep before taking it and are widely encouraged to do so, thus your performance is based on not just your talent but also your ability to grow your mathematical skills over a period of time.

Furthermore, the slow yet deep pace of the exam allows examiners to test the ability of students to grapple with much harder concepts and problems than the A level. Something similar is the advantage of the PAT over ESAT in my eyes: the PAT does a better job of testing students' ability to tackle the type of very difficult problems you might see in a physics degree than either A level physics or ESAT.

I also heard of a recent issue where personal information of users was leaked:
https://www.reddit.com/r/6thForm/comments/1ox6tw8/uat_data_breach_response/
https://www.reddit.com/r/6thForm/comments/1owf905/uat_uk_data_breach/

There was also another issue where students could use inspect element to access their TMUA results early.

While I understand the thinking behind STEP and PAT, they are both designed with A-level applicants uppermost. In England, it is common, even usual, for students to specialize very highly in the last two years of school and it is not uncommon for applicants for Maths or Physics to be doing A-levels in four quantitative/scientific subjects. Their brains are deeply trained in quantitative problem solving. However, in many, even most, international school systems it is not possible to hyperspecialize to the extent that A-levels permit and even encourage: students are expected to study eg their mother-tongue, a foreign language, a humanities subject up until 18, even when they are doing the most quantitative course possible. They inevitably cannot hyperspecialize to the same extent as A-level applicants and are less deeply trained in quantitative problem solving. It therefore makes sense for Cambridge/Imperial/Oxford to adjust their admissions tests to try to take account of students who have specialized less. If that means testing for speed rather than depth (which is how I understand the main difference from the test-taker's perspective between eg PAT and ESAT), so be it. What matters when admitting students is their potential to do very well over the three years of the degree, not the extent to which they have been hothoused in quantitative subjects to the detriment of all others in the two years preceding their degree.

EPFL in Switzerland, which is a highly competitive engineering university, has admissions requirements that are broader and less quantitative than Cambridge/Imperial/Oxford for the simple reason that the students that apply (the majority are Swiss or French) will not have specialized to the extent that A-level students do. However, a large proportion of students admitted to EPFL will either be chucked out during their first year or need to repeat their first year. That policy is unacceptable in the UK university context, hence the requirement for an efficient filter on entry.

Strong agree! But that is only an instinct.

Time will tell. If a more widely used test that is less of a barrier, easier to construct, easier to mark and can be used for multiple purposes turns out to work well, then it is probably right to make the swap.

My instinct is that the harder/deeper the filter test, the more hothousing goes on to the exclusion of all else. England's education system is unusually geared to very early academic specialization and I am not at all sure this is desirable.

EPFL is not in the same league as Oxbridge. The prestige and historical standing of Cambridge allow it to recruit the world’s most talented mathematicians for its undergraduate courses.
In fact, Cambridge recruits a significant proportion of IMO and EGMO medallists; MIT and Peking University operate in a similar fashion.

International undergraduate applicants from many European countries don't distinguish between Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, EPFL, EPFZ, Polytechnique etc. They apply to several of them and their personal preference ranking varies according to many factors. It is very common among the British to assume that Oxford and Cambridge trump all other undergraduate choices (in Europe if not worldwide) and that international students would prefer to go to Oxford or Cambridge over all other universities but this is not true. Oxford and Cambridge do need to compete for international applicants.

I don’t like the early specialisation either.
But elite university level STEM, as it existed in the not too distant past, did require a big cognitive leap from secondary education and the question is how to figure out who can do it. One reason degree classes were recalibrated almost everywhere 10-20 years ago is that students from less elite universities were earning better results with the commensurate rewards.

Now almost all of us post broadly similar results and it isn’t because the students have improved. (Pedagogy has evolved with technological progress, but this has not diminished the need for critical thinking. In many jobs it may be needed less often, but more crucially.)

Many overseas candidates are among those who can and do succeed at the myriad of entrance exams; but I agree that in the UK particularly many do train for these tests and training matters. This discriminates on the basis of socioeconomic status and nationality, and I am troubled by the persistent naivete of universities in this regard.

My dcs (bog-comp educated) sat the ELAT and HAT tests. They enjoyed them! Obviously some get through to interview who have not scored highly, but these tests are a good culling method for those who cannot cope with understanding unfamiliar material.

I agree with pp that these days masses of applicants look great on paper. Learning in bite size pieces and to the test is the order of the day. But they haven’t read around their chosen subject and, worse, seem surprised that this might be not just a requirement, but something that they actually want to do!

Eg I remember reading on TSR and on here of an English applicant asked about books/poems/authors she hadn’t studied at school (ie, “What other Victorian novels deal with…”) and they were raging it was unfair and wanted another interview…..

@poetryandwine "I agree that in the UK particularly many do train for these tests and training matters. This discriminates on the basis of socioeconomic status and nationality, and I am troubled by the persistent naivete of universities in this regard."

There is, within institutionalized education, a strong ideological desire to believe in the necessity and potency of the institutional offering (teacher + classroom based learning) vs any other influence (parents, private tutoring etc) on children's intellectual and academic growth. It is of course far easier to do research on the basis of standardized testing within institutions than to capture and analyze other inputs and that technocratic approach delivers technocratic outputs.

I wouldn’t get carried away with the IMO medallists criterion. Of course some top mathematicians, physicists and others have taken this pathway but plenty have not.

DH got a Distinction in Part III (Maths) at Cambridge before turning down their offer of a PhD for one that appeared less prestigious and he has had a wonderful academic career. I can’t think of a single IMO participant among him and his friends of a similar calibre (the British ones are Russell Group professors). In my field, I personally know two Overseas UGs who were IMO medallists (Gold and Silver, respectively), who sadly flamed out spectacularly at the UG level.

I am not arguing against the IMO but my impression is that it is regarded as one amongst varied ways of showing supracurricular subject accomplishment.

I agree societies want to believe in their institutions, and for educational outcomes what you say is a consequence.

In the UK I think this is compounded by a reluctance to acknowledge the relationship between class and educational pathways.

For Cambridge maths the first degree in part III doesn't open the door for the PhD program nowadays. It's the minimum requirement. You must find a professor willing to take you on.

"In the UK I think this is compounded by a reluctance to acknowledge the relationship between class and educational pathways."

Yes, my impression is that there is in fact quite a lot of good research about the drivers of measurable educational outcomes but that only the institutional drivers are politically acceptable - and of course actionable in the short term. Yet by looking much closely at the familial drivers of educational outcomes it might surely be possible to communicate those and support them? Good motor skills development and good language development are the product of effective parenting far more than they are of schooling.

Throughout UK STEM, AFAIK you have always had to find an academic willing to take you on, in order to be admitted for doctoral study. It is possible that nowadays some Centres for Doctoral Training offer funding that is not linked to a particular project, but in DH’s time these did not exist. (I did not mention it above, but his offer was funded)

Anyone on track for a Distinction at Part III should be a competitive applicant for doctoral study.

BTW all the regular academic ranks at Cambridge, not just professors, may supervise PhD students

State-educated DS applied to Oxbridge for a stem subject. By far the most intimidating aspect was the interview. I thought actually the exam was a worthwhile leveller, so I think it's a shame that that element is being dropped.

The admissions test isn't being dropped - just changed to another test that is used by several universities.