Would a person need to be officially GnT to consider Oxford?

[ZombiesAtYourCervix]

D1 is 15 and has decided that's where she is going. She is nice, sweet and hardworking but not brilliantly clever (predicted mostly As at GCSE). She just asked if she could go to an open day sometime to have a look around (very forward planning I know but that's her)

DO I encourage her or redirect her?

I take it you mean your RG university wasn't Oxford or Cambridge Notan Otter? As opposed to the difference in experience being a matter of time?

I think time may have accentuated the difference.

Certainly as a parent I'd find the idea of a pre-GCSE DD deciding that Oxford was where she was going really pretty concerning.

^'The postcode that an applicant gives as their home address, assessed using ACORN information. ACORN is a system that associates specific geodemographic profiles to individual UK postcodes; it is widely recognised and used by both the public and private sectors to assist in the effective targeting of policies, services and communications. Where a candidate?s postcode falls into ACORN groups four or five (Moderate Means and Hard Pressed) the application will be flagged. More information about ACORN can be found at www.caci.co.uk/acorn-classification.aspx.^

^An additional postcode factor will be used in the flagging for the coming admissions round. The postcode from an applicant?s home address is matched against the POLAR2 data set. This classification places regions into Quintiles based on the rate of young participation in Higher Education. Applicants from the lowest two quintiles will be flagged. More information about POLAR2 can be found atwww.hefce.ac.uk/widen/polar/polar2/'^ - University of Oxford

Hmmmm . . . . .

I see we are staging the Olympics here in London next summer. Just wondering if the IOC would consider giving athletes from deprived countries (Usain Bolt - Jamaica?) - where training facilities are inferior to that of affluent Western countries - a 10-metre head start in the 100 metres final?

I honestly thought that it didn't matter where you live either. Obviously our friends child just didn't get in or maybe didn't try for Oxbridge i don't know. She was adament he was refused on basis of where he lived. No it's not a really bad council estate. We are just on the edge of an old one but literally houses next to us are large modern and not council. I am not bothered where my dd goes as long as she is happy. Can't see her going to somewhere too snobby. She is such a quiet and well behaved girl and hardly talks at school and just gets on with her work but has many friends. In primary school she was ridiculed about being nerdy and that was by some of the mums! Now she is in year 8 she has had her predictions and they are saying A's and A's but i suppose its on the day and its not for a few years yeat, although she has already got an A in maths in year 7. This is her favourite subject along with history, english, science, french and german. To be honest its anything except for p.e as she is not sports minded at all. Always thought this could put universities off as she wouldn't be an all-rounder. x x

Oxford and Cambridge bend over backwards to take kids from less privileged backgrounds. Maybe not all admissions tutors, but certainly plenty from some of the richest colleges.

OP your daughter should look into it, and if possible go for a visit, they do lots of visits even for pre GCSE students. BTW my 8 year old has deided she is going to Oxford. In my experience it is quite normal for kids to fix on a Uni at quite a young age, they may change their mind later when they look more carefully at course (my older 2 fixed on Imperial and a US college).

ibizagirl - your daughter sounds great. No university is going to care at all that she's not sporty. A lot of lecturers are not very sporty either!

It's difficult to see what's objectionable about the flagging system. It highlights the fact that certain applicants come from deprived areas, it doesn't give them a place.

ibizagirl some parents of students who don't get in come up with all sorts of fanciful reasons as to why that was the case.

mummytime organised visits for younger students are part of Oxford's outreach work. These are not visits aimed at middle class kids, they're targeted. No-one, even in the Sixth Form, should 'decide' that that's where they're going. How does an 8 year old 'fix' on that idea? Possibly if they live in the city itself, otherwise it can only be parent led - in which case the parent is doing the child a very great disservice if they then fail to get in.

Yellowstone - an 8 year can believe that Oxford is the best uni in the world, and therefore decide that's where they want to go.

An 8 year can know that David Cameron got a PPE from Oxford, that it's the most common degree for politicians, and therefore decide that's where they want to go.

Not all 8 year olds are the same!

Of course they may change their mind later. But they can still have their heart set on it at 8 without it coming from their parents.

I doubt it Indigo.

But even if it's correct and they're that precocious as well as smart to boot they'll most likely wilt under induced or self-induced pressure by interview time.

Very unhealthy at the age of eight.

How objectionable Yellowstone. Who are you to decide what is unhealthy in an 8 year old?

It's Y8 not 8yo!

and OP's child is 15 in any case.

Well I don't think I'm G & T by any stretch of the imagination, and I got in....

I didn't do brilliantly at 16 - was above average for my academically selective school, but no more than that at 16. But I was always near the top for 2 subjects and this is what skewed it for me - at A level by being able to concentrate on a very narrow range of subjects I played to my strengths and seemed more academic then in terms of results than at 16. I think that probably happens with a fair number of children - not necessarily brilliant academic all-rounders but very strong in their chosen subjects?

I have been involved with Oxbridge admissions very recently (though not this year) and I don't think 7*s at GCSE is necessary at all. If you are coming from a top-rank school then yes, that is the sort of level that is likely to be accepted; but when I was interviewing we certainly admitted people with substantially lower GCSE grades after looking carefully at the overall application (including e.g. the ranking of the school). You get info about the sort of school it is and how well it does.

I was also always well aware that GCSEs are for the most part boring and not very challenging for the brightest. Those being well taught and carefully directed will no doubt do very well anyway but plenty of the very brightest teenagers are good-but-not-oustanding at GCSE because - justifiably in my opinion - they are putting a good proportion of their energy elsewhere.

I think it's actually easier for Oxbridge to be a bit more flexible about this stuff because they interview/set their own tests. If someone has mostly As and a few Bs at GCSE but a very strong reference, comes in the top 20, say, in the entrance test you have set (deliberately to be unlike school work) and does very well in interview then certainly I would take them over a candidate trailing A*s behind them at every turn who came in the bottom quarter of the test and was not particularly impressive at interview. I realise it's tough for parents because school marks are all they really have to go on; but it's only one piece of the picture for those running these admissions procedures.

One other thing I always did was look at module break downs - there's a difference between a solid A that includes an A* level mark in the hardest part of the A level and one that conceals a middling B in that paper, for instance.

Yes Yellowstone bog standard RG for me...

I am not a good example but dp did v v academic difficult to get in pressurised course and there's no comparison with ds at Cambridge. A lot depends on college choice .

When school first mooted Oxbridge with DS I was very reticent ( probably yr 9/10) you don't want your child to 'fall at the first hurdle' and a lot do

accepted = expected in the second line! no guarantee of acceptance I'm afraid . . .

Is this Natural Sciences NotanOtter? If so you can take heart (a bit) as the first year is notoriously appalling and it does ease up a little.

The social stuff you report is depressing though. I think you're right that things vary a lot college to college and even between year groups in that respect.

Kalidasa 7* was offered up by an Oxford tutor talking to sixth formers at a local school

Kalidasa yes it is !! Thanks for that maybe I can breathe easier this year!

Kali I agree re your entrance criteria - sounds much more fair and balanced

Well it's certainly true that the majority of successful applicants will now have grades in that range, but I would be very surprised if any tutors are actually using that to weed out candidates. There is also perhaps a difference between subjects that set their own admissions test and those that don't - for those that do, that is now one of the main ways of sifting applicants initially. But when I do outreach talks at schools I definitely tailor what I say to the school I'm talking to and perhaps that was partly the case here?

NotanOtter - I really think he'll find it a bit less horrendous this year then. And perhaps the social nastiness will ease a bit too when they're all under slightly less pressure.

In defence of the tutor talking at the school - those events are hard to judge and actually really nerve-wracking, especially at smaller/less well-informed schools, because you're really aware of how influential you can be and it's hard to get it right.

CaptainNancy, mummytime explicitly said eight year old, about her own eight year old. I didn't read anything wrong. I'm talking generally about 8 year old's, not mummytime's DD in particular. Generally it would be very, very surprising indeed for an 8yr old to decide of their own volition that Oxford was the right place for them, let alone the only place. How would they know?

amosquito I expect most child psychologists would agree. It's not objectionable in the least to warn of the dangers of setting children up for a fall. It's most unfair on a child. Aiming high is fine, but that's a separate point.

There is a difference between Oxford and Cambridge admissions in that Cambridge look at A level module results in detail - they ask to see UMS for every module taken and give people a score based on the average UMS of their top 3 (or 3 most relevent) subjects. This is as Kalidasa describes and therefore they can weight GCSE results much lower when deciding who to admit. Oxford on the other hand do not see the module scores for A level (unless they have been put on the UCAS form, but this is optional), so they weight GCSE results more highly (but still contextualised) and so you are more likely to need very high GCSE results to get a place at Oxford than at Cambridge.

Interesting point gelatinous. I have actually been involved at interviews in both places in the last five years (Cambridge slightly more recently than Oxford) and I admit I'd forgotten that we didn't necessarily get module breakdowns at Oxford. On the other hand, the subjects I was involved in interviewing for at Oxford (two and also a joint degree linking them) both set their own tests and my impression was that that took some of the weight off GCSEs as well. As gelatinous implies you give a score to each of several aspects of the application and then these are put together at the end.

The written work is also important of course. Not always in the way applicants assume - colleagues in MFL, for instance, tell me that they insist on marked language work because very often this reveals imperfect grammatical knowledge on the part of the teacher (rather depressing!) which gives them additional contextual information. (Not meant to be a snipe at MFL teachers btw, most of whom are excellent I'm sure - just that it was particularly MFL colleagues who mentioned this.)