english applicants

[this is true for medicine and law, too, but they're going to earn lots, so who cares about them :biggrin:

]
life's unfair as an english applicant, I tell you! You can watch other people get BBB or less at A-level and head off to universities you only wish you could go to, but you could end up with an A and two Bs or even two As and a B and still not be able to go there! When applying you have to face horrible ratios of over ten applicants per place (Bristol had 27!) and getting three or more offers is by no means a certainty! Why can't all courses be equally popular and have the same offers? and what makes English such a popular course? At Exeter, for example, geography offers are ABC, whereas for English, three As is now the standard offer! It's annoying because a lot of people look at the university without thinking about how competitive the course is!

P.s. sorry for using so many exclamation marks.

Reply 1

Tyler Durden

It's just how it is really. Good incentive to get top A Levels. Having said that, there are well-respected courses out there with ABB offers.

Reply 2

silence

a small secret you might be interested in: birmingham's standard offer is aab, but for those who miss a grade (yet keep the a in english), they'll often give them the place come results day. worth a shot.

Reply 3

yorkshirelass

It's not that bad is it? I got all my offers but I don't consider myself an outstanding applicant or anything. I applied to Oxford, Sussex, Manchester, York, Leicester and Leeds.

Reply 4

silence

maybe you're just fairly modest, or go to a school full of supergenii.

the original poster does have a point - to study english, even at an 'average' university, you do need fairly high grades. as englishstudent mentions above, it's not always about the university as such, but at certain offer levels, you mgiht find yourself looking at the course. some places which are considered very good universities, such as manchester, might have a more boring course than somewhere like sussex, for example.

Reply 5

mousy

yorkshirelass

It's not that bad is it? I got all my offers but I don't consider myself an outstanding applicant or anything. I applied to Oxford, Sussex, Manchester, York, Leicester and Leeds.

Out of curiosity Yorkshire Lass, did you take a foreign language at A/AS level? Some university english departments say this is an advantage.

Reply 6

yorkshirelass

I'm pretty sure my college is below average. I got 4 As with only a few 100% modules, but managed to get in my local paper and on my college's website. I imagine at a 'super genii' school they would only use students with 6+ As and loads of 100% modules. I wanted to study German at my college and actually applied for it but when I went to enrol I was turned down because apparently they haven't taught it in 10 years (yet it was still in the prospectus.. hmm). I took Media Studies, which if going by the media and all these University 'black lists' surely must have penalised me if anything (rubbish to me since Media was my most difficult subject and lowest UMS overall). I only studied 6 subjects at GCSE (8 GCSEs in total) and still didn't manage to get all A*s in those. My UMS marks at AS were pretty low in comparison with most A grade potential Oxbridge applicants: 248/300 in English Literature, 242/300 in Geography, 260/300 in Philosophy, 247/300 in Media Studies and 288/300 in General Studies.
So basically I'm not being modest. I'm just being honest.

Reply 7

silence

i suppose that compared to the concern in the original post regarding levels of academic achievement, you are outstanding in some sense. although it's common, at least accoring to media ramblings, for two or three As to be achieved, there is a world of students out there who are still above average but don't quite reach those heights in examination results.

i know i sound like a bit of a preacher, but it's very difficult to translate A level results (and GCSE results to some extent) into how good a student actually is. it can work both ways; as well as top unis finding it very hard to distinguish between students getting all As, it is equally as difficult to perceive the ability of students who get a few grades lower, such as BBB or ABB. with only a 10% difference in marks achieved which distinguishes between an A and a B at A level, it just seems that, if you were able to vaguely quantify it, the reputations and qualities of universities giving offers varies by a far greater margin than this.

Reply 8

etherised

A-Levels are pretty useless for determining ability at degree level. Or at least, the correlation doesn't work. I got straight As, because I was good at learning stuff. I know people with ABB at AL who intellectually can run rings around me.

The worst thing, I think, is the difficulty of finding an insurance place (or at least, one you might want to go to). I know so many people who had an AAB offer as their insurance for English.