Missed school, poor gcse grades, want to study medicine

Is this a joke?

Those grades are an abomination! Honestly, I don't even know if Starbucks will take you, you need at least 50k UCAS points to make coffee these days.

Low results? Your results are great for the majority of universities.

I know this is TSR, but seriously, well done.

Focus on your A levels and your BMAT/UKCAT and you'll be fine

I'm so scared because the rest of the people applying have at least 7A*s :/ and i was hoping missing 6 weeks was a valid excuse

if you feel that your studies have been affected by an illness, you can get your teachers to mention this in your referee letter but your grades are very good! It should not count against you when applying to university in any case. Good luck!

I'm so scared because the rest of the people applying have at least 7A*s :/ and i was hoping missing 6 weeks was a valid excuse

thank you !!! i really hope i meet the cut off score for imperial next year

Ask your school to mention it in your UCAS reference when applying. You'll need to avoid universities like Oxford, Cardiff and QUB because they're all GCSE-heavy medical schools and most people applying there will know this and, accordingly, will have 7+ A*s so you'd be below average in their applicant pools.



Imperial only applies a cut-off to the three sections of the BMAT (three separate cut-offs, mind you). That's the primary difficulty in getting an interview at Imperial: if you excel in two sections but have a panic attack in the third, that's it, you're not getting an interview at Imperial. It's harsh but that's how it works.

The rest of your application is considered holistically so as long as you get good AS results and A2 predictions (actually, not entirely sure whether this applies to you since you'll probably be doing the reformed A-levels...), they'll be able to see, looking at the mention of the lost school time in your reference, that the average GCSE performance was an anomaly and not reflective of your academic potential.

in my school we still have to do the AS exams to show universities what stage we are at and for predicted grades but i think if we continue them for A2 our AS exams won't count and our A2 exams will give the final grade

what a joke, doctors back in the day were studying medicine with b's and c's in Alevels

Bs and Cs were harder to get in those days than they are now. Although, I'm pretty sure you needed As and Bs (not Cs) to get into medicine even then (if one of my mum's consultant colleagues isn't lying). The grading of A-levels worked very differently then.

Ah, that's good, then. The universities still haven't released definitive policies on admissions based on the new A-levels. The trouble is that, while you'll be doing AS, some schools won't be. It's not fair to disadvantage an applicant who doesn't have an AS purely because of the school/college he or she goes too. I suspect GCSEs will become more relevant but they'll probably make it a 'we'll consider any and all information available' thing to avoid being unfair. We'll have to wait and see.

Also, you're right about the AS not counting towards the final A-level qualification. I personally hate these reforms but that's a story for another day.

Good luck. I hope you get in.

i have plenty of friends who are in 5th year med they've told me how easy it was

Five years ago isn't quite the 'back in the day' I had in mind. I was talking about pre-1990s but fair enough.

Yes, the requirements were lower then but the reason they've increased and continue to increase probably has to do with the competition for medicine - they need some way to narrow down applicants and it becomes very difficult when every applicant has or is predicted to have AAA and has similar work experience, extracurriculars etc.

So what do you do if you're an admissions team in that situation? You start asking for A*AA or A*A*A to filter more people out so your job of having to differentiate between applicants becomes easier. You also introduce an entrance test like the UKCAT or BMAT (which is a fairly recent thing - also introduced because of the competition) to further differentiate applicants. If that doesn't work, then you start discriminating based on GCSEs. It's a never-ending cycle really.

I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced a 1 - 9 grading system like they're doing at GCSE, where an 8 is equivalent to an A* and the 9 is a 'super A*.'

f*** the uk lool all doctors from eastern europe and asia these days may aswel branch out and study in another country