How important is maths for the most competitive university subjects?

[darkside]

My daughter wants to apply to university to study medicine. She is studying 3 sciences and one essay subject but not maths. She has several As at GSCE, her other subjects are A grades. Her A level targets are A, the school doesn't give A targets until after AS results.

How difficult would it be to get into medical school without maths at a higher level than A grade GSCE? Would dropping the essay subject to study AS maths be sensible?

Yellow, I'm intrigued; what do the pupils do in year 11/12/13? Do they all go to University under age? I have never heard of wholesale GCSE taking in year 10.

Also, if DD3 got 11 A* and no one got more, is she not at the top?? Just asking.

Jonny I'm at risk of being a bore on MN about this because a tutor asked me the same on another thread.... but essentially the Sixth Form is a three year one with the idea of more depth and breadth and more time for extra curricular stuff.

You're right that DD3 was one of the top 12 achievers numerically but it's always pretty clear in any year group which are the stars; she would be the first to say she's not one of those, there are a handful of outrageously brilliant pupils, she's downstream from them.

Adamschic:

Oh please tell your child to apply! Just look at my little ones (though quite scared for them now. They won't have met anybody who's got more than one A* at GCSE). They have got in mainly, I think, because their applications were so unusual and because the universities genuinely do take the child's background into account. Couldn't be bothered to read most of the discussion on this thread, but by the sounds of it applicants in some schools should be considered odd and underachieving if they don't get 5 As at A-level and Grade 8 in a couple of instruments. To be honest, mine are considered exceptional for having stayed on at sixth form.

Postcode is definitely a factor (when I spoke to one of the admissions tutors at Oxford, she said that an application from the school's postcode would guarantee an interview, irrespective of grades. I repeated this to our students, who just looked confused and muttered something about not knowing where Oxford was. Naturally none of them applied), but so is the school. If it is not a high-achieving school and your child is doing well, this is, rightly, a better reflection of your child than one who gets straight A* in a school where this is the norm.

Tortu, did your students who got places have the correct predicted grades and AS results? Hope you don't mind me asking this.

No, not at all (and we love boasting about them, so thanks for giving me the opportunity. Ha ha!). No they didn't. Their grades will be much lower and we have predicted this accordingly (and they are doing the IB so have not got any results from last year). We were extremely well advised by both Oxford and Cambridge who both came round and told us that any students from our area would be looked upon favourably. Although none of our students actually applied there, this did spur us on to phoning other Universities and finding out that this would be the case there too. Whilst I think that our students are very unusual, I can see that there is a fairly widespread attempt to help disadvantaged students- which I think is really to the credit of this country's educational system. And the pay-off for the universities is, of course, that our three students will do much better than probably most of their peers as they really will have got there against the odds.

1. One of the asylum-seeking students has no GCSEs, though English is actually her eighth language and she only started learning it a couple of years ago. So she is being let in to study Medicine with neither maths or English GCSE (though she sat the exams, so they can tell she's brilliant)! She is predicted the highest grades of the three and may actually do better (I teach her English- she's pretty impressive. We now all think that we under-predicted).
2. Our 'looked-after student' was the most interesting. The universities were leaping over themselves to offer him a place. He has a choice of offers (both lower then written in the UCAS booklet) and he's also got a pretty impressive bursary from the local council- there are social workers there who will weep with joy.
3. Our most 'normal' of the three is the 'assassination attempt' student who has been in the UK since he was 11. He is quite ballsy and just wrote a really, really juicy UCAS application. I suspect there are several university departments who passed it round for a good laugh- and, miraculously, he got an offer. Personally, I'm not sure he'll make it (he seems to think that, having got the offer, he doesn't have to do any work), so we'll wait and see!

If in doubt, get your school to phone the universities, as we found them all really helpful and positive (though am sure we're single-handedly fulfilling some sort of quota for them).

Although I do not know yellowstone I know the school and the numbers of students getting a full house are probably correct. There is a family fitting this sort of description.

The early GSCEs come with a price. Students chose their A levels a year early and when they are ready to chose a university may find they have not made the right choices. Some students are then tutored outside school as they hastily study another subject. There is a culture that suggests a B grade is a failure. I do not know if the drinking, drug-taking and eating disorders are any higher than other schools.

The school certainly suits some students but not all. Yellowstone has children who have done very well there and is perhaps blind to its faults but she is not lying about the exam results. Now to change my nickname back.