Feedback from Durham

Wow, they actually included some personal comments!
Letter -> Durham if I get rejected!

But the geog dept might not be as helpful as the law dept

You must get this a million times a day (after all, everyone knows your after durham on this forum ), but good luck! I really hope you get an offer - you certainly deserve it (just for how much you want it!)

Our primary admissions criteria is AAA at Alevel and we reciened well over 1,000 applications of that standard...........to put it someone what crudely, even if an applicant has AAA, excellent GCSE's, a good LNAT score and an excellent reference, they still have at best a one-in-three chance of being made an offer.

The English department are supposed to be writing to me. I rang them, and they said they'd ring me back. They didn't, so I rang them, and they said, rather sniffily, that they would write to me. I wonder what they'll say?

I think we have our explanation for most of the rejections this year.

That just makes it one huge lottery though, doesn't it?

That just makes it one huge lottery though, doesn't it?

Exactly. The "random" element of admissions (at not just durham, but other universities too, such as UCL) seems to becoming more and more prevalent this year.

I thought my grades were good enough to give me a realistic shot everywhere [7A*,3A, C at GCSE and AAAAA (geog, econ, maths, french, general studies) at AS], but it turns out every other student on this forum has exactly the same, and are in fact rather mediocre in comparison to many others; and consequently I only have offers from my insurance unis. There are many people who have managed to get into Oxbridge and have rejections elsewhere (Lillith Grimore has an offer at Cambridge, and a Durham rejection).

I think admissions are clogged with too many good candidates, making it, as you say a giant lottery.

the letter reads, unsurprisingly
'i am afriad that the main reason your application failed is simply because of the number of applicants we recieve. Our primary admissions criteria is AAA at Alevel and we reciened well over 1,000 applications of that standard...

'the only problem with your application- and there were factors considered in your favour- was that the writing seemed to be a little forced. In both the LNAT essay and personal statement it looked like you were trying to hard to impress the reader'

Con-tra-diction Durham. The reason people try to impress the reader is because the reader is an Admissions tutor with all those applications!

* Despairs!*

I know! What are you meant to do, write some boring, desperate drivel and send the admissions tutor to sleep?