Oxford Medical Applicants 2012

Dr Jeremy Taylor, the head of undergraduate medicine at Oxford, is a medicine tutor there too

Haha indeed. I totally stalked him when I was thinking of where to apply, decided he was brilliant, went to the open day and nearly died of happiness when I saw he was speaking. Needless to say, I have pages of notes from his talk. Good times.

He fell asleep during ours- Jan Schnupp had to wake him up to get him to do his speech!

I'm slightly confused about the percentage A*s thing. Do they look at you schools GCSE performance over a number of years, or just your year, or where you came in your year or what? I'm just asking coz there are some amazingly clever people in my year (one already has 3A*s at A2) but not every year at my school has people like that

I think they just look at your year as that's the most fair way of doing it... But I might be wrong. I doubt having a few amazing people will have that much of an impact anyway, pretty much every school will. They'll most likely look at the average % of A*s

The Percentage A*s is the Percentage of A*s you got at GCSE e.g. if you took 10 GCSEs and got 8 A*s your pA* is 80%. Likewise if you took 11 GCSEs and got 9A*s your pA* is 82%. If you still can't understand this, consider if you applied to the right course/place. It shouldn't really have to be explained in such simple terms but oh well.

I'm perfectly capable of calculating a percentage thanks. What I was trying to get at was how they use your percentage in terms or your school.

Hey, just had a quick question as I know that Oxford don't use ums, but my teacher included mine in her reference so I wanted to find out if these are likely to be looked at when selecting for interview or if they will just be ignored. Thanks in advance

These kind of people (Cottrill) don't deserve a reply, in my humble opinion...

From the 2012 entry application cycle UCAS will provide this information directly to the universities and colleges that you have applied to. Although it is already publicly available; UCAS has made it available for all universities and colleges in the UCAS scheme.

The information that will be available is:

the school performance of students achieving:
five A*-C GCSE including English or Welsh and mathematics or equivalent in England, Wales and Northern Ireland
five or more SCQF level 4 Scottish Standard grade including English and mathematics or equivalent in Scotland
the school performance relating to the:
average QCA points for the best eight GCSEs in England and Wales 1
average points for the best eight Scottish Standard grades or equivalent in Scotland
the school performance relating to the:
average QCA points per A level entry (or equivalent) in England and Wales1
average UCAS Tariff points per Scottish Highers entry in Scotland
the school performance relating to the:
average QCA points per A level student (or equivalent) in England and Wales1
average UCAS Tariff points per Scottish Highers student in Scotland
the percentage of students at the school:
entitled to free school meals *England, Wales and Northern Ireland
registered for free school meals in Scotland

*Note: the information for England has been sourced by local authority
the percentage of students at the school:
entitled to educational maintenance allowance in England, Wales, Northern Ireland (note this information will be available for one year only for England as this data will no longer be collected in England. It will be available for other administrations if still available through them)
registered for educational maintenance allowance in Scotland
Lives in a low progression to higher education neighbourhood (Polar 2)

I'm sorry if this sounds stupid but what if someone got 8A* and 2C's would their pA* still be 80%?

As far as I understand it, it doesn't matter if the non A*s are Es, Bs, As or whatever - seems a bit unfair tbh. So yeah, that would be 80%

When does Oxford get our bmat scores?

A week before us I believe, which would mean last Thursday. I think last year they gave interview invites from around 1st December