A few thoughts this week from our Director of Consultancy Services, Brian McGee, in answer to those who perhaps feel the Oxbridge application process is unfair.
We frequently hear news about super-bright students who fail to get a place at Oxford or Cambridge and the cry goes up that they are biased against candidates from particular groups. The truth is quite the opposite in my experience.
Oxford and Cambridge universities have worked incredibly
hard to make their selection processes as comprehensive and fair as they
possibly can, with a raft of procedures to ensure that only the very best
candidates in each cohort are offered a place. This is in stark contrast to
other elite universities in the UK, who appear to be so overwhelmed by the
number of applicants for each place that their systems sometimes seem quite simply a
lottery and quite unfair to many candidates.
Oxford and Cambridge have the advantage of the college
system, which means that applications are directed to the admissions tutors in
each college, who, along with their admissions teams, assess each application
individually against carefully constructed selection criteria for each subject.
These criteria are open and transparent and published clearly on their
websites.
Students applying to Oxford and Cambridge will have
submitted their prior qualifications and marks, predicted grades from teachers,
a detailed personal statement and a reference from their teachers. In addition
to this, Cambridge ask for extra detail about results and an additional
statement to address the candidate’s specific interest in the Cambridge course,
as they realise that the UCAS statement requires a broad brush expression of
interest in five possibly quite different courses. Oxford have increasingly
developed their own tests to supplement the increasingly unreliable predicted
grades.
Both universities interview significant numbers of
applicants in order to ensure that they haven’t missed something on an
application and to iron out the problem of highly-crafted personal statements
which are not a reflection of the candidate’s own interests and aptitudes. Far
from being the threatening and eccentric experience of folklore, these
interviews are carefully structured in order to test an applicant’s thinking
skills, usually aiming to move away from the student’s comfort-zone to areas
they have not considered before, so that the true signs of critical thinking
and curiosity begin to emerge. The interview process is explained very clearly
on the university websites and in the various visits they make to schools and
colleges, so that candidates will know what to expect.
Once this process is complete, both universities then carry
out a systematic moderation across colleges, so that a good candidate in one
college is not compromised by an unusually strong cohort for that year. Oxford
does this during the interview days, with applicants often being interviewed by
two or three different colleges during their stay. Cambridge uses the Pool
system, which enables college tutors to draw an exceptional candidate from the
pool if they feel they deserve a look; they may then re-interview that
candidate before making a decision.
No system is perfect and both universities acknowledge that
many very good candidates will be disappointed, but compare this with other
universities, some of whom simply do not even appear to have read some
applications, and it becomes clear that these two institutions have truly tried
everything they can to develop open, transparent and fair systems.
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