Clickable link within a UCAS form?

[pippop1]

A friend told me about the following. Apparently in order to stand out to admissions officers UCAS applicants can put a clickable link into their personal statements on their UCAS forms. The idea is that the admissions officer would click on the link which would take them to a webpage where they could see a short video of, for example, the child actually playing the piano at Grade 8, or whatever achievements they had listed.

This didn't sound true to me but my friend was insistant. She'd heard about this new practice at a (paid for) talk for parents whose children wanted to study medicine.

Has anyone else heard of this? It seems rather unfair if a DC is able to set up such a webpage. It also seems to be cheating in some way in that anything could be put on this child's webpage, thus extending the amount of information supplied to the admissions officer vastly.

I think if I was an admissions tutor I would think this was hideous!

I do wonder sometimes if the people earning money by advising gullible anxious parents have any idea at all how admissions officers work. I don't work in undergraduate admissions but I have some contact with people who do and it is increasingly automated and pressured. Applications are likely to be scored from the exam results and the officer (who is an administrator) may be the only person who looks at the statement. The tutor will only see the ones the officer has assessed as being the best, and for medicine in particular there are so many that the tutors will often not read the whole statement, just the bits the officer has highlighted. None of the academics I know would be impressed by a clickable link in a personal statement. Apart from anything else, they just don't have time to go clicking on random links.

Having said that, for music, drama or fine art I suppose it might make some sense.

Thanks. I thought it just couldn't be true.

Has anyone heard of such a thing?

I thought that there was a limit in the length of personal statements, so that the idea of adding a link and thereby increasing the length of that statement would not be permitted.
Anyway, I recall that admissions tutors have said here (and in the press) that they are looking at the academic results - so the fact that you have Grade 8 Oboe is only of interest if you are doing music and being an England international sportsman doesn't give you a leg up into a natural sciences degree.