UCS 6th form entry

[Moochiemum]

Hi, can anyone advise of the assessment process and any prep.

I understand it is a writing task and thinking skills assessment - any can shed any more light of the latter in particular from recent experience.

Following with interest. They haven’t given much information have they!

DD did the exam last year. The thinking skills is the Cambridge Admissions Test so do plenty of those past papers to get a hang of the styles of questions. Mainly questions are a block of text and they have to choose the main argument or summary of it

Thank you. Had no clue where to start on this one

Is there a link or an exam code to download these past papers? I found one that says Thinking Skills Assessment Section 1
D512/11Wednesday 30 October 2019
Is this the correct one?

DD received an offer today along with a Music Scholarship offer. She’s excited but nervous. Currently in a super selective single-sex school. High stress and high levels of mental health issues in her current school.

Any insights? We have said the choice is hers but would appreciate the feedback experiences of others

@mbell - a year on and we are in the process this time around. Did your DD accept her offer, and how is she getting on?

Yes she did accept the offer and is now in half-term.

The music has lived up to all expectations so far. She’s loving that part of school life.

DD is really happy with her choice to move. She’s making friends, has been invited to a couple of parties and is joining in a lot of activities at school.

There is a lot of work but also a fair number of study periods which she’s using to her advantage.

Her results from her single sex school were brilliant but seeing her more relaxed and happier is worth more than any Grade 9.

That’s great to hear @mbell. Hope we’ll be in luck for an offer!

@mbell and @campahannah thank you for sharing such useful info, and pleased all going well at UCS. DD passed the exam and has her interviews coming up. Do you have any advice as to what to practice for the interviews or what they are like?

Well done on getting to interview stage! @JoSamy

There were two separate interviews with different teachers

-one asking why UCS? Questions about herself, hobbies and interests, achievements. What would she bring to the school? What clubs and activities she might join?

She specifically mentioned people she knew already at the school and that they were happy and enjoying school life.

—second was with a subject teacher and explored why she was interested in those subjects. DD discussed a book on Epigenetics she had recently read and why she found it interesting

There we’re no extra exam style questions or tests.

I would recommend reading through the prospectus carefully and pick a subject she is interested in from one of her chosen A Levels that she can speak in more depth about.

Good luck!

@mbell thank you so much that is incredibly helpful

@mbell If you don’t mind my asking, did you get any sense in your DD’s year as to roughly what proportion of interviews converted to offers?

@Marisquita
I’m afraid not. Interviews seemed to run on different days from what I could make out.

W

Thanks @mbell. Yes, they are running them on two Saturdays this year.

@JoSamy was your DD at UCS today? We were there and found it all ran quite smoothly. Good luck to your DD with her application.

Hi @Marisquita no she is next week. Hope it all went well for your DD over the weekend. Was it as expected?

@JoSamy Yes, DD and friends from her current school found it pretty straightforward as expected - the sense being that they are really trying to put the students at ease and get to know them rather than trying to trip them up in any way. They may be asked to expand upon the ideas in the writing task they did in the written assessments. Otherwise very much in line with what’s been helpfully summarised upthread.

Best of luck for Saturday!

Hi @campahannah , @mbell
I understand this post is quite late to the original post date but my DD's assessment is this Friday and as you can imagine, the nerves are high!

Would you say the assessment has a higher portion of written or problem solving questions? The TSA seems equally split but looking at other schools entrance exams, there seems to be higher worded questions than maths questions. I was curious if UCS seems to uphold this trend.

Also, would you happen to know how many students roughly move on to interviews? It seems to be a high portion and that the TSA has a low boundary but of course, these terms are quite vague, I don't believe that the school would be looking for a score that oxbridge would accept as they're still students but this has been one of the main worries for DD.

@Hector1203 I’m afraid I don’t have answers to the specific questions you’ve asked. Sorry.

A good nights sleep and careful reading of the questions is all I could recommend this late in the day! Best of luck. DD still very happy there

@Hector1203 I was on the thread this time last year, and DD is now happily at UCS. I would say roughly 80% of the girls we knew who applied (from her school and others we know locally) got interviews. Of those, maybe another 80% got offers and the remainder were waitlisted but never got the offer. Obviously such anecdata may well not be representative of the overall stats.

DD was getting scores in the 50s (i.e. 50-59%) in timed practice on a few past Section 1s from TSA papers, and was very worried that it wouldn’t be good enough. She found the UCS exam was, overall, easier than the ones she had seen before. We were told later that she had done particularly well (in the context of the cohort). So I don’t think at all that you need to be getting a score that would get you an Oxford interview, because that is not the level that Y11s are at yet.

Hope that helps, and best of luck to your DD.

@Marisquita @mbell Thank you both so much for the help! This is more than enough to put DD at a bit of ease as she's roughly scoring 55% in the practice papers. Thank you again!

@Hector1203 How did your DD find the test on Friday? Mine went into it totally blind - no practice tests or anything beforehand. UCS said it couldn’t be revised for so just went with it thinking if she gets in then she definitely cuts the mustard academically.

Without giving away any of the exam content as I believe they have an alternative exam date, she thought it went quite well. Felt she did justice to the writing piece and that the TSA test was “fair”. You had to read the questions carefully and there wasn’t a lot of spare time but she finished it with a few minutes left for checking answers to the ones she found tricky.

@DibbleDooDah Likewise! She thought the exam itself wasn’t hard but keeping up the resilience to go through 2 hours of reading passages was, luckily she managed to finish her writing task with about a minute to read over and the TSA the same.
Compared to the maths questions, she found them quite a bit easier than the actual TSA and the critical thinking on the same level which is fine as it’s her stronger point, however there were 2/3 maths questions which she was a bit confused on, but she overheard girls saying that the exam was very hard whereas she found it quite okay, so the threshold hopefully can’t be that high.

She only got worried seeing someone finish with 35 minutes left! But since the majority of applicants go into interviews, i’m not too concerned.

Best of luck to your DD!

@Hector1203 Likewise for your daughter.

@Hector1203 Hope it was good news for your daughter today? It was for us - she is the only one who applied from her current school so nobody to really talk to about it!!