Ask an Admissions Tutor IV, 7 July - 27 July 2014

As promised, here is the fourth instalment of my 'Ask an Admissions Tutor' threads. If you went to the Cambridge University Open Days last week and forgot to ask a crucial question or if you weren't able to go but have questions you would like to ask, or, indeed, if you just have questions about Cambridge Admissions, please ask it here and I will answer as soon as I can. This thread will run for three weeks and then a further thread will run after the A Level and AS Level results come out.

how would cambridge Admissions Tutors react to an applicant who after receiving results in august, decides to resit a few modules in order to improve grades and apply in 2015? Is it bad to do a levels over three years?

First of all, congratulations on your offer. As you say, you may well find your enthusiasm sparked again once you start the course - ASNC is a terrific course and, because of the small number of students doing it, has an excellent supportive atmosphere about it.

If you decided you wished to change then it would be possible providing both your ASNC DoS and your English DoS agreed. This can happen at any time, though it usually be at the end of Part I. Were you to swtich at the end of the first year, you would probably need to re-do the first year in English and so would have four years at Cambridge.

Thank you very much for this - I feel really reassured now; it's good to know that even if the 'worst' should happen and I end up not enjoy my course, there might still be a solution Thank you!

Hi again! I have yet another question;

One of my A levels is a language I have been studying 9 years prior to sitting the A level. At this point I'm bilingual however it is not my 'native tongue'. I can say with confidence that there is a high probability I'll get at least an A.
Would Cambridge view this as an unfair advantage?

Hi, again. Sorry, but more and more questions come to my mind. I saw on the Oxford site that you can't apply to both Oxford and Cambridge at once (in the same admissions round to quote exactly). That means you can't apply for the same course at both universities or you can't apply at both universities regardless of the course you choose?And why on UCAS do they let you choose both universities with the same course if you can't apply like that?

Most people who apply for Medicine (probably 75%) get an interview and on paper successful candidate usually have very strong perforrmances in at least two of those three indicators and probably in all three. It is, as you no doubt know, an extremely competitive subject. This slide gives a good idea of the performance of the gathered field in Medicine in 2012 in terms of GCSEs and UMS.

I'm applying from the USA to Christ's for engineering and have some questions about the school reference: as I understand it, it's an amalgamation of reports from teachers about the applicant's performance in their particular subjects. No one at my school has written one before, so should I request a) a fairly impersonal counselor's reference or b) one from my English teacher who knows me very well and has offered to consolidate testimonials from my other teachers if that's what's necessary, or c) one from my math teacher and robotics club sponsor who faces many more requests for recommendations. While I know she'd write me an excellent recommendation, I don't want to distract her unnecessarily from helping the team if she needs to take into account my other teachers' reports as well.

Also, if input from various teachers is required, how far back should I go? Should I ask all my teachers since beginning high school or simply the math and science teachers or only teachers from my last two years? Thank you so much!

Thank you very much for the information! So may I just ask, what would normally be considered as a strong bmat score (and how in particular are the different sections considered)?

Hello. I'm hoping to apply for geography, but I'm a little confused about the ums. I did a few a levels early and got high ums. However my second best ums is in a subject I sat at the normal time. So I was wondering when calculating the ums score do all the subjects that are used have to be taken in the same sitting. Thank you.

Congratulations on your results George, they are certainly strong enough to apply so don't worry about them now, just concentrate on the other aspects of your application such as reading around the subject.

Well, we take the BMAT into account along with the rest of the application, so a score which was a little lower might be considered as nothing to worry about unduly if the UMS and GCSE was very high, but the same score might be worryingly low if the GCSE and UMS were not very strong.

To give a good rule of thumb, however, a score of 5 in Section 1 and Section 2 puts you in the top half of candidates taking the BMAT. 6s are very strong and 7s and above are outstanding. On average at Christ's, our offer holders have just over 6.

A rather special question: I took 7 Math modules (C123 S12 FP1 D1) this year in AS, but I am certificated by my school with AS math only (3 modules) which will appear in my UCAS. There are two modules that I self teach myself (which is D1 and FP1), which math modules do you take into account when calculating UMS score? Could I discard the D1 module if I get a rather low UMS (80 ish) since I self teach myself and I have a bad day on D1 and it is not a proper module. Do you take the three math modules into account only since it is stated on the UCAS form? (Btw it is a medicine applicant).


Posted from TSR Mobile

Hi there, it should not be a counsellor's reference. it needs to be academically focused to be helpful to us. I would go for either your Maths teacher or your English teacher as long as the latter is able to collate reports from other teachers. You only need reports from the last two years.

So how many references do we need for the application? One from the school and one from a subject teacher?

Thanks again!