Giving Feedback to Cambridge - 2017

It depends which assessment you did, and whether it was the scaled or raw mark.

Oh that's fine, what about section 1 only? If you answer in scaled marks could you please specify what the scale mark would translate to? thank you

It was the scaled mark for section 2. Many thanks in advance

Hi.

As the parent of an applicant I would like to say that both my son and I have been very impressed with the admissions procedure. It has been incredibly thorough and, regardless of the eventual outcome (he is a re-interviewee), my son has gained a great deal from the experience. In particular we have been impressed by the interview process. My son is naturally shy and so the interview stage was always going to be tricky - particularly as he had started to really care about the outcome and was extremely nervous - but every effort was made to put him at ease at all his interviews and he left each one with the impression that his interviewers had genuinely wanted him to do well.

A couple of things might be worth noting as feedback. In contrast to an earlier poster, my son found section 2 of the NSAA very different from the sample paper in terms of time constraints. That is, he completed the sample questions within the time and scored highly (he asked his teacher to check them) but in the real thing he barely had time to complete half of section 2. This probably simply shows that these tests are always subjective but I thought it worth mentioning.

Secondly, the College where my son was re-interviewed had Student helpers guiding the candidates and chatting to them in the waiting room whereas his original preference College did not. He found that chatting to the current students really helped to calm his nerves before his re-interview and he was better able to ‘be himself’.

Thank you and the other AT’s for contributing to TSR - your advice and support has been invaluable to students (and anxious parents!) Thanks as well to @jnell and @vincrows for all their sage words.

Then I'm afraid I can only assume you were not being shown an overall assessment mark, but a mark for an individual question; section 2 marks were not distributed on the scale 1-9, and I'm not aware that we interviewed anyone with a raw mark total of 8.

I felt the admissions process was fairly smooth on the whole. I too would like to see the results of pre-interview assessments; I understand the second part is hard to standardise across the university as each college does it separately; however would it not be possible for the section one marks, which are multiple choice, to be released?

I'm not sure if all applicants were emailed early but I myself got the email quite early which I liked - this was good because it meant I was not waiting too long to find out the result, and especially because my post arrived two days late!

I liked the communication with the admissions team - the responses were prompt and helpful while also quite nice

However, I do have to ask; were there any Christ offers that were not A*A*A or above this year? Even for subjects that have standard offers of A*AA Christ's seem to have given double A*

Thank you

Further to my last post, I have done a bit of poking around TSR and it seems to me that a number of Christ's offer-holders are actually exaggerating the difficulty of the offer they received. I've seen one or two claims of offers that are significantly higher than any we actually gave in the subjects concerned. So you should perhaps take some of these claims with a pinch of salt...

Fine, there was a yellow piece of paper with a box on it and an eight in it. I assumed that was for section 2 but clearly it wasn't.

Yellow is usually the paper on which we record the interview scores, if that helps?

It certainly can't have been the interview score as I saw it at the start of the interview! It must've been a pre-interview assessment mark of some description. Thanks for all your help

Ah, yes, there is a box at the top of the yellow form in which assessors can record a pre-interview mark, based on the overall academic record. So they clearly liked you, as it's out of 10

Does that take the pre-interview assessment into account?

In section 1 only, it was 4 (as previously posted). That will translate to different marks in different subjects, and for different options.

Usually, yes.

Thanks for everything. One last question, my offer has chemistry specified as being one of the two subjects I must get an A* in. Physics, a module which I will certainly be taking next year (if I meet my offer conditions) is not mentioned. Does this mean that I just have to finish the physics course? And more generally for science am I required to pass the practical assessment? (There was no mention of it in the letter from Christ's)

Further to my last post, I have done a bit of poking around TSR and it seems to me that a number of Christ's offer-holders are actually exaggerating the difficulty of the offer they received. I've seen one or two claims of offers that are significantly higher than any we actually gave in the subjects concerned. So you should perhaps take some of these claims with a pinch of salt...

Hello everyone, congratulations to all who have received offers, commiserations to those who have not and best of luck (and apologies) to those few of you who are still waiting.

Every year we have an internal review of the Admission round at Cambridge and last year my predecessor at Christ's used this forum to elicit general feedback on our process from students who had gone through it. The feedback was very helpful to us in (we hope) improving things, so I wanted to follow his example this year.

I am not in a position to provide feedback on individual applications or say why you didn't get in but rather this is an opportunity for you to say if there are things about the process that might be improved and make comments I can then pass on. I will also try to explain some things which might seem odd about the process.

The thread will be open for a week and I will then report back to my colleagues with good points. Thank you for your points and also for the applications.

Hi, I have 2 questions to ask:
Firstly, do you know the average number of A*s for history of art applicants?
Secondly, if I take A level maths a year early and get an A*, what impact will this have on an application?
Thanks in advance