UCAS chief: 'Schools are exaggerating predicted grades'

would you have preferred a rejection?

Why did you apply to a course where the offer includes an A in Maths?

Being an admissions tutor must be a terrible job. You get 800 applications but can only accept 100 students because your department only has resources to teach that many (staff, labs, lecture theatres, etc). If you recruit fewer than 100, your department loses fees, and that means people lose jobs - so you have to get it exactly right. You can't just give 100 offers, because some of your applicants will choose one of their other offers. So you look at the proportion of 'conversions' you have got over recent years (say 25% on average, or 1 in 4 - after all, they might have five offers to choose from), and know you have to make 400 offers to get 100 'CF' decisions. But that won't be enough because (according to UCAS data going back several years) half the applicants won't get the predicted grades. So you need to get 200 CFs to get 100 students with the grades, which means 800 offers. So you offer everyone who applies a place, and have a very nervous wait until August when you discover what has happened, and if you have 50 (disaster) or 100 (relief) or 150 (panic) students.
Obviously you don't do this. You make offers on the conservative side, say to 500 applicants, and get 125 CFs. Then in August you find you have 70 whose grades actually meet the offer, so you also take the best 30 people who wanted to come, but just missed the grades required. They wanted to study with you, you need them to study with you - and no-one ever knows they missed the grades because the data is confidential. Only your 'mean entry tariff' is ever published and that includes all tariff-bearing qualifications not just the ones in the offer.
So being admissions tutor is like being a bookmaker. You play the odds, and if you are careful, it is not such a terrible job. But importantly, this does mean that on results day, anyone who just misses their grades should immediately ring up their chosen university admissions offer to find out if they are one of the lucky margin who will be accepted anyway.

You make offers on the conservative side, say to 500 applicants, and get 125 CFs. Then in August you find you have 70 whose grades actually meet the offer, so you also take the best 30 people who wanted to come, but just missed the grades required. They wanted to study with you, you need them to study with you - and no-one ever knows they missed the grades because the data is confidential. Only your 'mean entry tariff' is ever published and that includes all tariff-bearing qualifications not just the ones in the offer.

I don't think teachers are to blame in this situation at all. If unis are letting in students who've missed their offer by two grades or more to fill the course, that just shows their standard offer is to high. Having a "standard offer" of AAA/AAB or higher is a marketing tool- especially when standard offers are used in league table rankings. It's also possibly caused by previous years when unis could take unlimited numbers of students getting AAB/ABB or above. If uni standard offers were more accurate, then teachers wouldn't need to over-predict.

Either that, or unis are so desperate to fill their courses they're taking student the know won't cope and they expect to fail or drop out at some point during the course.

I do think applying after results would be better for everyone. It would be a less stressful system for students, as it would avoid months of wondering if you're going to meet your offer or not, and avoid the mad scramble of clearing on results day. It would also avoid the need of messing around with firm and insurance places.

If results could be produced in July, between July and October, students could apply with a UCAS Extra style system, i.e. applying to one uni at a time, and the uni has to reply within a set amount of time- I think 10 working days would be doable given the lower number of students applying to each institution at a time. Most students would be able to target their applications at the right level, so probably wouldn't need to apply to more than 3 universities. For courses/unis that want to interview, a gap year would probably be required, or they could start their academic year in January.

I think that we could have a predicted grade system, but it would be deemed a lot more accurate if students were forced to submit all their UMS marks on UCAS for all unis and courses, who could then go on to use them as they liked. This would hopefully mean that the unis could have something extra to distinguish between candidates, as well as a better grounding for judging whether the prediction is actually realistic or not.

Just wondering, does this then mean that Universities will accept you even if you fall short of the offered conditions?

My firm choice set me A*A*A* as offer and my insurance A*A*AA ; I'm predicted A*A*A*A* so that does make some sense. But I think only the stronger universities do this since the other weaker universities I applied to gave me fairly low offers of A*AA (Warwick and Durham) or A*AB (Bath)

Where tf you going to study that they're asking for A*A*A* 😂

If M C-C carries on pushing it then what is most likely to happen is that UCAS will lose their monopoly as soon as Oxbridge opt out and the rest of the RG follow to try to keep their myth of prestige.