Is it worth switching from independent to state for A level if applying for a highly competitive subject?

[rougheredges]

DS is in yr 10 in an independent school. He’s really happy there- we’re pleased with the academics and he’s got a lovely group of friends. He’s currently predicted grade 8/9 in 9 of his GCSEs (and a 7 in DT which he’s doing because he loves if!) He’s managing this pretty effortlessly.

Currently he’s thinking he’d like to study Economics at one of the tougher universities to get an offer from. He knows he’ll need lots of extra/ super curriculars as well, but his friend’s dad told him today that he might find it harder applying from an independent school. Apparently there’s less wiggle room and the bar is higher.

I’ve looked online and there’s a lot of conflicting information. Most of what’s out there seems to refer to contextual offers which isn’t relevant. I’ve read that it does matter/ it doesn’t matter/ they take where you did GCSEs into account so it’s too late/ they prioritise state schools/ it’s all about grades and PS.

I fear the answer may lie somewhere in the middle of all that but is there anyone who could give more guidance? His current school are keen to keep him (he’s currently an academic scholar with a princely 5% bursary!) so I’m not convinced they’d give unbiased advice.

(Local state school is great. He’d have gone there but it’s C of E and we didn’t qualify being disorganised atheists who figured it out too late. They remove the church attendance requirement at A level.)

Does anyone have any info?

They are not majors. It's the UK, they're just studying either a single subject or a specific combination (eg Physics and Philosophy or PPE or whatever). It covers the whole range of areas, pretty much.

They are likely to get all A stars. Don't think the Uni care about the 4th (it's for medicine too).

I don’t think that sort of ‘formulaic’ approach works.

My understanding is that each candidate interviewed is looked at ‘as a whole’ - GCSE results (and their context); predicted grades (and their context); any other contextual markers; personal statement including supracurriculars (includung as interview prompts); interview performance; subject specific test performance; interview-time task performance.

A subset of these will be used to select for interview, and that will be a bit more formulaic due to numbers applying.

So the balance between the elements is not discipline-specific as much as candidate specific.

Is it maybe a way of taking the pressure off a bit? Things are much better from that point of view these days, I think. I guess it's like I said, someone getting an offer from a highly competitive university is unlikely to be actually getting a C in anything.

Also, I've been thinking about this and actually, what we were told was needed in the interviews wasn't a huge amount of knowledge although that obviously might help. They said that the academic content of the interviews would be aimed at assessing how the young person thinks and takes on new information and that it didn't matter if you got a question wrong as long as you were able to explain your reasoning and also benefit from any extra information or guiding questions that the interviewer might follow up with. I am not sure there is much sensible preparation for that (except obviously fostering resilience etc which I would hope all parents at least try to do).

Many years ago, but my friend who went to Oxbridge to do medicine was asked at interview how he would accurately be able to tell the difference between a patient who was unconscious, a paralysed but conscious patient and a patient who had been anaesthetised with a general anaesthetic. He wasn't even doing Biology A Level. I don't think too many school children would necessarily be able to come up with the right answer! But perhaps there was no one right answer (I'm not a scientist) and it was more about seeing if someone with no real prior knowledge could come up with a sensible testable hypothesis (which might be wrong but thinking on your feet is, I imagine, a great skill for a wannabe medic). Anyway, he's an Oxbridge educated heart surgeon now but I remember him absolutely panicking about it afterwards!

Just going by common sense, hard subjects tend to have a more structured, quantifiable process such as admission tests and competition results.
Take maths for example: I don’t see any students with top maths competition awards and strong TMUA/STEP scores struggling to get into Oxbridge.
By contrast, humanities like English feel much softer and more subjective, with less measurable data and more focus on interviews and personal statements.
I do think it’s completely reasonable that they take a holistic view, but the balance between objective and subjective assessment still feels very different between STEM and humanities, in my opinion.

I remember parts of my interview in 1997!
There were some more cliched questions like is capital punishment a deterrent? (All I knew about capital punishment was based on the film Dead Man Walking), is a civil jurisdiction better or worse than common law, in your opinion. This was after reading an extract of a case and some legislation.
But most memorably, I was given the most bizarre set of facts. It went something like a man drugs his wife to go out, she then commits arson whilst sleepwalking? Her elderly neighbour is severely injured and said neighbour’s dog dies. What crimes may have been committed and why? First they expected me to do it with zero input. Then gradually I am fed handouts of the crimes of arson, GBH, property damage etc etc
I am then asked at the end, if things may have been different if the woman already had a conviction for arson. There was also some discussion about trial by jury.
I had read one short book about the legal system, was completely clueless and my idea of law was more based on morality having read Crime and Punishment and discussed the Stranger by Camus with my friend on the way up. I knew there were solicitors and barristers and there were different levels of court and had a vague understanding of how Parliament worked and how legislation was passed. In the discussion, there was a long debate about why murder has to involve killing a human and never a dog! I remember feeling quite offended by a man drugging a woman and a dog being killed (I was a staunch vegetarian at the time). I think there was some discussion about animal welfare and related legislation, which I was interested in on principle although did not know where the legislation stood at the time.

Meanwhile, my friend who I had travelled up with had applied for French and Italian. She got told at interview that Camus was most likely a druggy in real life and that his books were fanciful nonsense! (I think the expectation was that she should argue why this is not the case) She had to discuss whether books should be independent of anything an author stands for or does not stand for. She also got quite “offended”!
The whole experience in those days was bizarre and there were no female tutors interviewing us. Now Oxford does all interviews online I think and Cambridge does it half half. Part of why it was both fun, memorable and intimidating was going up there though and encountering some of this in real life. One of my friends got in but refused to go based on the interview (cannot remember what was discussed at her interview).

Hard subjects?

I imagine most mathematicians at Oxbridge would find the corresponding English course quite a bit more than they could cope with. I imagine most History students at Oxbridge would find studying Physics no fun at all. The PPE students would more than likely absolutely struggle with Fine Art.

My brother did Maths at Oxbridge and would have floundered doing Classics or History or French or indeed anything that wasn't Maths.

“We”

Don’t you mean your DC has an offer?

This tell just about sums up this thread and the attitudes of many parents these days. This is your DC, not you.

No, I mean my school. My own kids are already well settled in their carers thanks.

I mean hard vs soft subjects in the philosophy of science sense. Hard disciplines have strict, formal logic, predictive power, and universal laws; soft ones rely more on interpretation, context, and human behaviour.
Usually we think maths and physics are harder than chemistry, which is harder than biology, which is harder than social sciences, which is harder than humanities.

We ??? I find maths chemistry and physics easy. English, French and Art I'd find impossible.

OK, thanks for explaining.

My experience of Cambridge mathematicians is more that they are always going on about some unresolved theorem, Goedel and machine learning and higher consciousness in AI. Far from hard science stuff, to an outsider it sounds like a religion! And some of the scientists have access to cutting edge labs and new technologies in eg gene therapy so they can be most enthusiastic about changing the world too and quite ideologically so as well. Perhaps that is why they are looking for “passion”.

Yes you are completely wrong. Read the admissions reports for physics which Oxford publishes. They select for interview based on GCSEs, PAT score and contextual information - they even give the formula. They score interviews, then they combine interview score, PAT scores and GCSE scores and rank everyone and they offer according to the rank and contextual information. They are humble enough to acknowledge that it isn’t a perfect system and they will miss some good candidates. But they can’t make offers on the basis of winning random competitions as not everyone will have access to these. If you are in the British physics Olympiad team you will ace the PAT and the interviews, you don’t get extra points though for being on the team.

For STEM subjects that haven’t been studied at school eg engineering and material science, they will be looking for evidence of some broader understanding of the subject which can be evidenced by super curriculars but that does not necessitate winning competitions.

Other subjects, particularly humanities or where there is no admissions test, may be very different.

There was someone on mumsnet this year whose DC score 90+% on the MAT and didn’t get an offer so the interview must have been decisive.

This has been discussed previously on mumsnet. If you apply with 4 A levels the university can make you keep up all 4 A levels even if their standard offer is only based on 3 A levels. Imperial in particular makes harder offers to students studying 4 A levels than 3! (A star A star AA versus A star A star A for maths for example.) In this case by asking for C for the 4th A level Cambridge is really just saying the student can’t drop it.

This is one reason why students should be very very careful of applying with 4 A levels; much more important to get 3 very strong predicted grades.

Other subjects, particularly humanities or where there is no admissions test, may be very different.

I don't think they are so very different. Where there is no admissions test, applicants are asked to submit written work completed at school. Admissions tests have recently been dropped for some humanities subjects so I guess they were not giving the info that admissions tutors need? I presume they score the written work in a similar way to any admissions test to feed into who they invite to interview. It has to be work completed in the normal course of a student's A Level preparation and marked by a teacher. So for all subjects, admissions tutors will have seen some of the candidate's work, seen their GCSE scores and the context in which they were achieved, and seen the personal statements before an interview. With respect to the person who did not get an offer despite a high score on the admissions test, maybe post-interview it was felt that the tutorial/supervision system would not suit that candidate? It does not suit everyone! I'm sure that talented young person will go on to do really well wherever they end up.

Thanks for the info. I find the Oxford Physics admission formulas:
https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/system/files/file_attachments/AdmissionsReportDec2024.pdf

Pre-interview: PAT mark + 10 x cGCSE(contexual GCSE)
Post-interview: PAT mark + 10 x cGCSE + 2 x (Average Interview score)

This suggests that the applicant's sixth form carries no weight in the mechanical scoring; instead, contextual information is fully indexed to the school where the candidate sat their GCSEs. It seems to imply that taking the opposite path to the OP—achieving outstanding GCSE results in a comprehensive school and then moving to a good sixth form (private or grammar)—might be more advantageous for an Oxford Physics application.

they offer according to the rank and contextual information...But they can’t make offers on the basis of winning random competitions as not everyone will have access to these. @WW3

Offers are not necessarily made acccording to the rank.

From the report https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/system/files/file_attachments/AdmissionsReportDec2024.pdf

“Post-Interview R-score = (PAT mark out of 100) + 10 x cGCSE + 2 x (Interviews out of 100) where negative cGCSE scores are omitted. This ranking is for guidance only; all applicants are assessed individually based on their R-scores, PAT scores, interview results, and all information on the UCAS form, including contextual information, and then compared centrally against all applicants applying to Oxford Physics. ”

I think the wording implies that a BPhO medal listed on the UCAS form will be considered during the final offer stage as part of the holistic review.

So Cambridge not Oxford but after my relative had an interview for Maths at Trinity they specifically asked him to contact them when he knew how he’d done in the Maths Olympiad and let them know where he’d ranked. 🤷‍♀️. He was still waiting to hear if he’d had an offer or not when he emailed them to let them know about the maths Olympiad. Maybe it didn’t make a difference, but then why would they ask him to do that if it doesn’t?

It must be the BMO1 result they were after. A BMO1 medalist qualifying for BMO2 is ranked in the top 100 in the UK; given that Cambridge makes 300 domestic offers, that level of achievement actually makes a candidate overqualified, statistically speaking. It’s no wonder they wanted to know. Of course, he would still need to meet his A-levels and STEP requirement afterwards to officially meet the offer conditions.

They are asking him for a relevant piece of information that, for obvious reasons, wasn’t available at the time of the interview. Entirely understandable.

It is equally understandable that one of the other successful students getting an offer may not have even entered the competition. They may have got fewer problems right in the interview, as well, but ‘in the round’ were considered to have the ability to thrive once at Cambridge.

The whole thing is still confusing.

For example, a Maths or Science applicant from a top selective independent school is told to only focus on supercurricular and that Oxbridge give zero damn if they are currently first Cello in the NYO as well, which shows to me that they can manage their time and are doing NYO just before national exams and through many holidays.
Yet a child who is doing care at home for a younger sibling their time commitment towards that is considered.
The reason they cannot consider the NYO is what because playing the Cello is elitist and not relevant to Maths/Chemistry? Come on, in the real world most of us love to recruit someone who does and can do both! And plenty of mathematicians are also good musicians, in fact, it is a fantastic thing to show in the “real” world.

I think it is wrong to equate NYO and being a young carer purely on the basis that both take time.

Behind the cellist is:

• money - for instruments, lessons and high level ensembles
• space - for practice
• transport - to lessons, groups, auditions, performances
• parental attention - to identify opportunities, to support practice, to find out what’s available and apply for it.

Behind the carer for a sibling is

• poverty - at least 1 parent of a disabled child is typically unemployed
• housing that may not meet their needs, through adaptation for sibling, and may well not be quiet for study
• trapped in the home - someone will always need to be there
• mental load - responsibility, stress, ‘what if’, taking on adult roles before their time
• glass child syndrome - absolutely not the focus of parents

Do you really feel it’s ‘unfair’ to take the latter into account, as part of a range of contextual markers?