Question regarding Cambridge admissions

Hello, I have often heard that when applying to Cambridge, there is a certain "Luck of the draw" in application. I was wondering to what degree this is at play in the application + interview stage. In effect, how many people who apply do not get in are people who are worthy of Cambridge but simply had stronger competition, and how many of the rejected were simply not qualified/able to handle the workload?

Reply 1

username6266554

The statistics that you're asking for simply doesn't exist because it would be biased, people get rejected for all different types of reasons and your saying of 'who are worthy of Cambridge ' doesn't make sense.

Theres people that got A*s and got rejected, I'd say they're worthy but maybe they wasn't fit for their course?

hope this helps

Reply 2

davros

Original post by Anonymous

What does "worthy of Cambridge" mean? There are numerous admissions tests and interview stages which are used to help inform decisions on admissions and make sure that only candidates who are passionate about their subjects and can fit in with the Supervision system are admitted, but no system is perfect - there are people with 4 A*s at A level who find the workload too intense or unsustainable, or who have to drop out for personal reasons.

In a sense, all university applications are "luck of the draw" - if a uni has 200 places for undergraduate maths and 300 people apply, then 100 will be "unlucky", regardless of how "worthy" a candidate may be!

My personal opinion is that the situation is far worse for applicants now than it was in my day - when I was at school, few people took A levels, even fewer went to university and Oxbridge applications were virtually unknown in Comprehensive schools - I heard of one other applicant in my town the year I applied. Now everyone who's predicted A*AA or A*A*A is getting told "why not put Cambridge down - it's only one choice out of five?" Unfortunately the objective of widening university access carries this inevitable side-effect: more applicants = more rejections.

tldr: it's impossible to answer your question meaningfully :smile: