Do you regret going to Cambridge University?

I agree. What an oxbridge degree does is get your foot in the door more easily: grads get noticed and are one up on getting the interview, but that is just the first step in getting a job. Employers know grads can work, but there is also the question of technical qualifications and fit.

One thing to add about the subjectivity: admissions tutors want to find the people whom they would enjoy teaching. That's often a gut feeling, but at interview it's the chance to perform.

I know some who can and were rejected or pooled.

You know about confirmation bias?


Of course, and questions are great. Honestly.

And that's why Cambridge unlike, say, St Andrews, Durham, Imperial, Warwick or LSE, have multiple admissions staff very actively participating on TSR - night and day, every day of the week.

The problems arise when you don't believe the answers. Especially when similar answers are being given by multiple people independently. Both by "officials" and current/recent Cambridge students or even, ahem, parents.

Sure, the "system" isn't perfect and could be improved. No-one, least of all Cambridge, has ever claimed otherwise. They even run an admission feedback thread on TSR every year and have implemented improvements as a result.

But on the whole it seems to be right than wrong.



If you've been on the Cambridge forum for 2 years or so you already know the answer to that one. But it seems, again, you don't believe it.

I've received an offer from Cambridge for Maths and heard how demanding the course is and the amount of hard work required! Does anyone wish they went to a different Uni? Plus what are the parties and nights out like?

Any claim that Cambridge is 'unaccountable' is, frankly, ludicrous.

To be fair to @Melanie Leconte (as I think that it is her comment that you are referring to), I think that her objection is that is hard to "account for" some of the decisions taken on objective grounds. If we take her comment in this sense, then there is something to be said for it. It is not as though all candidates sit the same exams (as they used to) and Cambridge takes the top N.


However, as part of the decision making process is based on the judgement of interviewers of the future potential of a candidate, (and has to be, given the requirement to open access to candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds), this is to some extent unavoidable. An "objective" accountable system is replaced with one that has a fair degree of subjective judgement built in.




It has to be said that Cambridge is far more transparent in its processes than most other universities. Also, it leans over backwards to be fair to those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

You make good points.

I personally think that a degree of subjectivity is absolutely welcome in the process. I can't really think of any objective measures which could indicate whether a candidate would benefit from the supervision system, for example. Given the importance of small group teaching at Cambridge, there is little point in admitting an applicant who appears stellar on paper but in the subjective opinion of the AT's would not be able to benefit from it, even with sufficient support and exposure.

ITT: anecdotal evidence and generalisation

. However, as part of the decision making process is based on the judgement of interviewers of the future potential of a candidate, (and has to be, given the requirement to open access to candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds), this is to some extent unavoidable. An "objective" accountable system is replaced with one that has a fair degree of subjective judgement built in.

I think it's fair to say that the one admissions element that does lack some transparency is the interview. It has been suggested by this forum that Cambridge could usefully do a study along the lines of their published analysis of GCSEs, UMS, STEP, etc as an indicator of Tripos success but for the Interview. Apparently, for various reasons, that's not viable.

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To be fair to @Melanie Leconte (as I think that it is her comment that you are referring to), I think that her objection is that is hard to "account for" some of the decisions taken on objective grounds. If we take her comment in this sense, then there is something to be said for it. It is not as though all candidates sit the same exams (as they used to) and Cambridge takes the top N.

I think it's fair to say that the one admissions element that does lack some transparency is the interview. It has been suggested by this forum that Cambridge could usefully do a study along the lines of their published analysis of GCSEs, UMS, STEP, etc as an indicator of Tripos success but for the Interview. Apparently, for various reasons, that's not viable.

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how an interviewer scores each element of interview can be different from another interviewer assesses it

Ah, poor Cambridge, whatever it does it seems to be the recipient of accusations like this! Melanie, let me advance some suggestions in the hope of persuading you that you are being a tad unfair.

Forty years ago I went to Cambridge to study maths - this is the system as it was then. All candidates took the Cambridge Entrance Exam. Most candidates for Cambridge prepared for the entrance exam which they took at the end of the term after they had finished A-levels - effectively the start of a third year of sixth form. A few candidates did attempt the entrance exams in their fourth term of sixth form, but that was seen as quite risky!

The exam I took consisted of four three-hour mathematics papers, a physics paper and a general paper. The mathematics papers were at a level fairly well above current day STEP, with paper 4 (the "scholarship" paper) being a complete brute.

A nice objective system? Well yes, but Cambridge (and Oxford) came under a lot of pressure to change the system because very few state schools were able to prepare candidates for the entrance exams. State schools (other than the best state grammar schools) tended to pair up with local independent schools to get their candidates prepared.

If we roll the clock on to today, we see a system in place that is intended to be as fair as possible to a wide range of candidates from different backgrounds. (A lot of the exam component is based on A-levels, an exam that is far easier these days that it was in my day, so there is far less discriminatory power in them; so Cambridge has to deal with academic evidence that is, in some ways, much less useful than it used to be.) The idea of this "holistic" assessment is that (a) candidates from weaker schools are not disadvantaged and (b) future potential is balanced with past achievement.

So, you will get candidates given offers at Cambridge who do not have stellar records of academic achievement. This is principle (a).

But the other principle, that Cambridge are looking for potential, is of enormous importance, and might provide an explanation of why candidates, who to your eyes are just as good or better than some offer holders, don't receive offers. The fact is that mathematics at university level, and especially at Cambridge, is quite different from what you learn at A-level. Much of the A-level syllabus corresponds to a couple of units of a university "mathematical methods for applied maths" course; much of what you learn at university, especially the rigour, will be entirely new.

Spotting whether candidates will be able to make that leap from school to university maths is difficult - doing well on STEP seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition - after all, there are students who do well on STEP who flounder and do poorly in the Tripos. It took me a eighteen months to adapt to university maths, having done well in the entrance exams.

Hence the interview system (and the new entrance tests, I presume) that is designed to try to work out how you think and how you'll adapt to the new situation. There are some people who can become exam-machines, stamping out good STEP II answers to order - but when you put something new in front of them, they flounder.

They could control for that, assuming* interviewer X consistently marks relatively "high" or "low".

*Of course it might not be a valid assumption, but if it isn't then more training is needed

The fact is there is an interview score potentially available, but the problem is that many interviewers apparently don't score the interview in isolation, they score the overall application. Which is fine, but they could, and probably should, do both. Giving their interview score, and their score for overall application would provide the necessary data points.

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I know some who can and were rejected or pooled.

It is about Mathematics after all... Srinivasa Ramanujan!



I think I am allowed to ask questions..?!.. in order to make my mind up, NO?!

I wonder sometimes whether you are a parent, a helper, an AT, a DoS,...who are you?!!

The way interviews are conducted is not uniform. Each interviewer has their own style/question and it also evolves during an interview differently from candidate to candidate depending upon how they react/cope with it.
And because of that, it can make scoring of each element on same basis very difficult or even meaningless sometimes.
As with the whole assessment process, it's a bit like putting many pieces of puzzle to complete a picture of jigsaw puzzle. Size and importance of each puzzle is different for each candidate's strength/weakness/personality. Giving it numerical value and disclosing it to public who are not aware/doesn't understand its complexity can be more misleading.

If the interviewers are all using their own subjective scores, then how on earth can one candidate's score be fairly compared to another's?

And have you been back there in the last 20 years? Because I don't recognise any of that description from 2003-2008 while I was there.

Just to help the balance, I had an absolutely fantastic time at Cambridge, I was there because I wanted to have my brain stretched, and it was, and it was fabulous to have all those opportunities within walking distance, food and a warm bed on hand, health services at your beck and call, faith, culture, art, history, performance, all immediately available and more sports and facilities that you could shake 20 different types of stick at.

I had bags of time to make friends, go out in the evenings, play new sports, try new activities, because everything is possible and nothing is more than 20 minutes away, including your home.

There's a brilliant diversity of people, and there are all sorts of 'difference' that are completely ignored because 'different' is entirely normal in Cambridge. Everyone has their own story and they are accepted for it.

I can't think of any circumstance in life where you will ever have such opportunity laid out to pick and choose from, save if you stay employed by Cambridge or possibly go to the other place.