Uni visits - when?

[tenbyeight]

Just want to know when do people take their kids to visit universities? 1st or 2nd year of A levels? Or as soon as gcse results come out?

according to Ho6th, DH who was HO6th in a high-achieving grammar school, doncha knowwink and friend who is HO6th!

Go and ask an admissions tutor in a department comparable with the ones your daughter is thinking of applying to.

I have no idea where sixth forms get their ideas about university admission from, but being involved in admissions policy for my department and having had two children go through admission in the past few years, what the schools say is largely wrong, inadequate or misguided. They don't tell children about things they do need to know about, and perpetuate ludicrous myths (particularly around personal statements) which have no basis in fact.

Thanks, that's really helpful. I did think that the Personal Statement thing was overrated - if there are 100 students applying for a course, surely most of them are going to be pretty similar anyway. Maybe I will try to find an admissions person/anyone on the uni visit DD is letting me go on and ask directly in front of her!

Neck - I wonder if one reason that some schools encourage kids to put thought into their personal statements is that it's practice for CV writing?

Back to open days - while I'm sure you can rock up anywhere and tour the campus and probably accommodation without booking, a lot of the talks and department tours get booked up very quickly. Dd has got onto booking pretty much as soon as the bookings open but has never yet managed to get a place on one about accommodation which she'd wanted to. I'm not sure we missed much just went and talked to the accommodation office people but for engineering (and sciences) you really do want to go on the tours and hear the dept talks, and even booking quite quickly not always got ideal timing.

Errol, that's interesting - the two DD went to she just had to sign up for the academic talks and accommodation was tours on the day AFAIK.

Some places do give lower offers ( for some courses even unconditional) to students they really want. I'd guess this may depend on interview which might in turn relate to what's in the personal statement as a starting point for discussion.

if there are 100 students applying for a course, surely most of them are going to be pretty similar anyway.

100? A typical RG course that's actually viable will get at least a 1000 applicants.

As someone on another thread who's actually an admissions tutor said, the problem with personal statements is that almost everything people put in them boils down to "I am middle class, and my parents have given me lots of opportunities because they have the time, money and inclination"; if you used personal statements to do admissions you would basically kill any hope of a diverse intake stone dead.

Personal statements from first-in-family applicants from schools with no tradition of sending students to selective universities are often a car crash (I read them prior to doing "one on ones" at applicant visitor days) and if they actually were being used for admission, they would be excluded on that basis alone.

Students from easier backgrounds clearly invest a lot of time in personal statements, get offers on the basis of their sensible A Levels, and thus inadvertently perpetuate the idea that it was the effort on their personal statement wot did it. It's like the myths around secondary admission: people who would have got a place anyway but who did some weird ritual involving chicken entrails tell people it was the chicken strangling that got the place, forgetting that they live next door and have four siblings in the school already.

Get reasonable GCSEs. At the end of Y11 look at prospectuses. Carefully note the A Levels that are required and desirable for the general sort of courses you want to do. Do those A Levels. Come Y13, look at the grades required. Pick courses realistically based on your predicted grades, in places you fancy living in for three years. Visit a few of them to get a sense of the courses and the departments. Apply and get five offers. Work hard for your A Levels. See you in October.

I have sat through one admissions talk where the lecturer stated the Personal Statement contributed 70% of the decision to interview the candidate.For the same course another University stated the only thing that mattered ( after a level prediction / GCSE results) was work experience.The Personal Statement barely figured.I think each student needs to do their own research and not be swayed by inaccurate information.

Some places do give lower offers (for some courses even unconditional) to students they really want. I'd guess this may depend on interview

No, because there are few places that still do interviews. One of the most persistent myths on MN is the idea that the typical student will be interviewed. Two universities do it for everyone, as do med schools, one university does it for many/most, and a small number of universities do it for particular courses or for borderline candidates (we used to interview everyone with a particular qualification we were nervous about, but have now decided to just no longer accept it as we couldn't reliably judge at interview anyway).

Unconditional offers, at my university at least, go to applicants whom one can deduce, in the manner of bridge bidding conventions, have applied to Oxbridge, in the hope that we can encourage them to firm us if Oxbridge turn them down and think well of us when taking a decision about insurance (I can't recall precisely where the row with UCAS over "firm-only" unconditionals has got to).

There are also contextual schemes in most universities for students from deprived backgrounds, although that usually at most a grade drop.

Everyone else gets the standard offer.

I have sat through one admissions talk where the lecturer stated the Personal Statement contributed 70% of the decision to interview the candidate

So you're in the wild edge cases already, because if 1% of applicants overall are interviewed I would be astounded.

For the same course another University stated the only thing that mattered ( after a level prediction / GCSE results) was work experience.

Medicine, right?

Tilly, I think the things which get booked up are (a) general talks like accommodation which all however many thousand across all subjects may be interested in and (b) lab tours where they can't take more than a dozen or so at a time. We looked at booking Durham for last weekend late and all the dept talks and tours were fully booked so if dd wants to look there it'll have to be in autumn (it wasn't on her list initially because it only does general engineering not the separate disciplines)

No,Vet. Science

That's interesting, neck. I've heard it said that some unis will be 'all over' early applicants ie those applying to Oxbridge for non- med subjects and what you say supports this. (But that Durham discriminates against them - I'm not at all sure I believe that.).

I'm still not clear how the offers are made for oversubscribed courses with an excess of applicants predicted with excellent grades if they don't use personal statements or interview.

Necks posts are spot on.

I do think it's worth encouraging DC to put some effort into their PSs even if they are not going to be read. I think it's good for them to have a think about why they want to study something. It's all part of the process of making them own their own decisions and it also helps get them excited about the future. My DCs school gave almost no help at all. I didn't think it mattered as even if the Unis read them it would be clear that some DC had help with their PS and others didn't.

No,Vet. Science

Same thing for the purposes of admission.

MN is heavily trafficked by people whose children are applying for "those courses you have to apply to in October": people medicine, tooth medicine, animal medicine and Oxbridge. Their experience is dissimilar to everyone else's. The medicines want work experience because you'll be doing hands-on stuff from early in the course so they want to know you have some basis for saying "yes I can do that". Oxbridge know that there are plenty of very bright people for whom tutorials won't work, so they use interviews (ie, mock tutorials) to pick out the people who will both like and benefit from their system.

Extrapolating out from those courses to the more general case of the other 95% of applicants is misleading, to put it mildly.

I do think it's worth encouraging DC to put some effort into their PSs even if they are not going to be read. I think it's good for them to have a think about why they want to study something. It's all part of the process of making them own their own decisions and it also helps get them excited about the future.

I completely agree. Writing coherently about something helps to clarify your thinking. My dd is a good example of this. She is trying to decide between 2 similar subjects and trying to make the ps appropriate for both. Eventually, she realised that a chunk of what she had written was really about one of the subjects. That surprised her, but in a good way.

A friend of mine whose son was at Winchester said he had to write why he wanted to study his chosen subject before he wrote his Personal Statement. I think that's a really good idea.

Yes that is a good idea, Olives - I will get DD to do that for both her possibles!

Yes, Olives, a key question a lot of people have no answer to is "Why ?"

If the answer is "because it's good for employment" you're risking three/four years you don't enjoy followed by a job you don't enjoy because, paradoxically, the better a degree is for employment in its own field the worse it tends (on average, in general, YMMV, etc) to be for employment in other fields. If the answer is "because my parents want me to be a doctor to do it", then ditto, with knobs on, plus parental outrage when you "waste your degree" doing something else.

I think it is a wild assuption they are not going to be read. It is very bad strategy to say this to a young person. Lots of top class universities say, very precisely, on their web sites that they DO read personal statements and, very precisely, how much weight is given to them when assessing the suitability of the candidate. Always assume it is read.

Always read what is required and what is taken into account for each course. This may be work experience, A level grades, precise subjects required, GCSE results and breadth, and Personal Statement, portfolio, interview (and probably other elements I have not thought about) . Never listen to MN contributors who do not have the full information for every course at every university. You must do your own research!

There is a fair amount of variability between different university admissions and subject departments and admissions. Key admission tutors also change. There is also what is said in public and what happens behind closed doors. TBH I think rather than trying to second guess how important the PS is for a DC's favoured universities that particular year it is easier and more productive to devote a little time in writing a good personal statement for the positive reasons that Lordy detailed. The PS also acts as a focus for some background reading which is never wasted even if it just confirms to a student that they like thinking and finding out about their chosen subject which after all is the point of doing a degree.

I don't disagree with the anything send says.

The point I was making is that a constant narrative at sixth form parents' evening, from parents who don't have direct insights into admission, is the idea that you should work in a shop / do DofE / volunteer at a charity for admission to general degrees. That isn't about variability, that's simply wrong. There is no course which is selecting on DofE, not even SportEx type courses. There is no course, not even business studies mostly because they aren't in a position to be picky which cares that you worked Saturdays in Next. Certain specific volunteering is required for certain specific degrees (the above-mentioned people and animal medicine) but for English? Er, no.

The two misconceptions are based on:

(a) the idea that you need to prove that you have determination, commitment, etc. Er, that's what your A Levels prove. Why look for indirect evidence that you're able to stick at something unrelated to study, when candidates have a nice certificate with grades on it telling people precisely how able they are to stick at study?

(b) the idea that admission to university is competitive, irrespective of subject and institution. There are a small number of courses and a small number of institutions which are competitive. Everywhere else makes offers to every plausible candidate and admits every plausible candidate who gets those grades. And "plausible" means "is within throwing range of the required offer and has a pulse".

The very specific concerns of parents obsessed with their children being doctors students who want to be doctors have dominated the whole discourse, and people who want to do History at Reading or Elec Eng at Bath or Education at Bishop Grosseteste are being told that they have to jump through hoops in order to win one of the rare places handed only to the elite/elect. It's hideous, because apart from anything else we know there are students put off from applying to university because they don't believe they have "done enough" to get a place. Those students are almost without exception from disadvantaged backgrounds.

There are a small number of courses and a small number of institutions which are competitive. Everywhere else makes offers to every plausible candidate and admits every plausible candidate who gets those grades.

I agree that Mumsnet has an enormously distorted viewpoint. For the vast majority of courses, all plausible candidates indeed get offers.

Students should always write a good personal statement as practice for job applications later, but it plays a role in very few university applications. (Even for some highly selective courses, personal statements are not relevant except for small talk at the beginning of interviews.)

Students should always write a good personal statement as practice for job applications later

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The Personal Statement has become sui generis, with its own "rules", making it entirely like any other piece of writing. One is its bizarre length restrictions on characters rather than words, which is presumably an artefact of some particularly poorly thought-out database schemas. One is the idea that it's read forensically with a set of criteria that might, just, be used when reviewing final text for a journal with particularly strict formatting rules. One of my children was told to revise and resubmit over the pressing issue of the choice between ' and " to mark book titles, for example). Has anyone ever won or lost a potential place at university over the sort of quotation mark used in references? No, they haven't.

I agree that writing a piece about why you want to do degree X at institutions {Y1, Y2, ...Y5} is a good idea, if you're someone who can write, and engaging in a socratic dialogue about it with someone who knows what they're talking about might help sharpen your thinking. But the more general effect of personal statements is to erect another barrier to applications to certain courses by people from deprived backgrounds, as they are (erroneously) told that their application will be rejected if they don't have a personal statement listing expensive hobbies and recherche books that no-one without access to a university library could have read. Many of the statements from first in family FE college students are very, very weak and if we used them to select, would be problematic. That's (amongst other reasons) why we don't use them to select.

Neck - im still curious how those (few) courses which are oversubscribed select then. One of my DDs choices will be in this category(not Oxbridge or medical).

im still curious how those (few) courses which are oversubscribed select then.

There are loads of courses which are oversubscribed. The point is that (a) if a course isn't 5:1 oversubscribed then the natural action of the UCAS form and then clearly means that it isn't (ie, if you imagine a world with 5 universities each with 100 places and 500 applicants, every place would be 5:1 oversubscribed but in the end everyone would get a place) and (b) standard offers are set so as to balance applicants against places, with the offer usually being an indication of how desirable students think the course is.

The elephant in the room for admission is A Level grades: the offer is a measure of how popular the course is, and measures a mixture of the subject, the institution and the location. Why mess about picking through unreliable personal statements when you can simply raise the standard offer, which is a virtuous circle? The achieved tariff is a key input to a lot of league tables, and a lot of students are attracted by high offers, thinking (not entirely wrongly, but not as much as they hope) that it says something about how good the course is. We raised our offer and got more applicants and more conditional firms: what's the beer that used to advertise itself as "reassuringly expensive?" People are reassured by high standard offers even if you end up taking large numbers of people who actually miss that offer, because you can keep quiet about that and it often doesn't show up in the tables because you include in the achieved tariff qualifications that you didn't use for admission.

Most people deal with high or low numbers by raising or lowering their offer until they are happy they have about the right number of conditional firms to get about the right number of students come October. It's safer to err slightly on the side of under-recruiting if you're popular, as you can pick up any shortfall by accepting some of the conditional firm students who miss the offer (I've heard of students with AAB offers achieving ACD and still getting their first choice). The statistic no department is going to tell you without a gun to their head is "if your standard offer is AAA, what is the lowest set of grades you actually accepted prior to results being published, and what is the lowest set of grades you accepted in clearing?" And the statistic there is no way to calculate is "of the applicants, how many were realistic applicants whose qualifications were remotely suitable?" Popular, high-profile courses attract a lot of applicants who are never going to get in whatever happens, but they bolster the impression of those courses being wildly over-subscribed.

The places that for various reasons can't admit just by raising the offer use other stuff (references, aptitude tests, etc) as input to an interview process and commit a lot of resources to that, up to interviewing every plausible candidate. They may have very clearly stated work experience requirements, too. What I don't believe is that there are any significant number of courses which admit by looking at personal statements and then using that to either make a conditional offer lower than they would if they offered to everyone, or a no offer decision, and I don't believe that the personal statement is a significant input into the decision to interview (ie, if two candidates differ only in the quality of their personal statement, I think most/all places would interview both).

The key point is that if universities are operating a hidden set of criteria which they cannot objectively defend as being necessary to either (a) ensure people are suitable for the course or (b) select the stronger candidates from an excess of people who meet criterion (a) then they do so at serious risk to their OfFA credibility. That's why I am deeply sceptical about the "ah, they may say that, but..." or "well, behind closed doors they think..." claims. A university will publish its admission requirements, including listing the weight if any placed on particular things in the application, and if that isn't the truth, they are taking a substantial risk.