The Official Cambridge Offer Holders Thread 2017 Entry

When you need to work but all you can do is gorge yourself on Uncle Ben's risotto at nearly midnight and watch twitch streams.

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When you give up with English Lit and play Pokemon all night

I can officially proclaim my lack of competence for the 'modern' English Lit texts

Give me Shakespeare (Hamlet FTW) over Atwood any day of the week

How far through are you with your Paper 3 topic? We finished ours before Christmas because our teacher's having to leave soon which was incredibly fast and not much has gone in unfortunately 😂 Also do you have any tips for the source questions because I feel like that's where I'm falling down a lot

Oh gosh tell me about it - if I have to write Madagascar Plan ever again I s2g 😂 The first thing I got asked in my interview was about thencoursework it was actually quite fun - but that was before I had to trawl through numerous interpretations trying to find something I could use 😓 You sound about the same stage as me though thank god!!

I think I'll definitely do the print out thing, but I don't want to change my phone wallpaper in case I desensitise myself it's so scary though isn't it, that we have an offer but it could slip through our grasp 😩

The most modern text we're doing is Regeneration and it's actually pretty good tbh. Though I feel you about English Lit - had a mock today

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For paper 3 we're about 3/4, maybe 80% of the way through. I've also struggled a little bit with the source questions, as for tips I guess just make sure your inferences link back to the question clearly, and if you can link them to the provenance directly do it rather than dedicate a single paragraph just for provenance. I initially didn't think enough about the intended audience of the texts either, and what we can infer from it in relation to the question. They're straight forward questions, in theory - we structure it as 2 or 3 paragraphs of inferences showing the strength of the source and 1 or 2 showing its limitations as well as the intro/conclusion. It's just you get some vague sources in which it's hard to develop coherent, plausible inferences from.

Do you have any idea of what grade boundaries might be? For our mock we did a Source Q and a standard essay, and it was 36/40 for an A*, so I assume a normal paper will be about 54, but it's the first ever year of the paper so maybe it will be lower?

Here's my motivational wall also have a picture as my phone background so whenever I get distracted I feel somewhat guilty for procrastinating (but not enough to stop)

I'm not sure if you've noticed but you spelt Cambridge wrong, but otherwise it looks really good

Haha, how much work did you do?!

All the cool kids spell it Cambride now bro

I swear, you guys seem to be putting in more work than I put in last year and this year combined.

Here's my motivational wall also have a picture as my phone background so whenever I get distracted I feel somewhat guilty for procrastinating (but not enough to stop)

For the stats-lovers amongst us, here's some provisional 2017 applications/offers numbers which were released in a batch of FOIs today:

Comp Sci: 859 applications, 131 offers
Economics: 996 applications, 181 offers
English: 761 applications, 240 offers
MML French and Spanish: 188 applications, 93 offers
Geography: 323 applications, 118 offers
HSPS: 926 applications, 205 offers
Law: 1136 applications, 266 offers
Mathematics: 1449 applications, 530 offers
NatSci: 2799 applications, 739 offers

I'm not sure if you've noticed but you spelt Cambridge wrong, but otherwise it looks really good

All the cool kids spell it Cambride now bro

I swear, you guys seem to be putting in more work than I put in last year and this year combined.

For the stats-lovers amongst us, here's some provisional 2017 applications/offers numbers which were released in a batch of FOIs today:

Comp Sci: 859 applications, 131 offers
Economics: 996 applications, 181 offers
English: 761 applications, 240 offers
MML French and Spanish: 188 applications, 93 offers
Geography: 323 applications, 118 offers
HSPS: 926 applications, 205 offers
Law: 1136 applications, 266 offers
Mathematics: 1449 applications, 530 offers
NatSci: 2799 applications, 739 offers

Interesting, but a slightly curious list of subjects. eg. no Medicine or Engineering on the sciences side. And no History, or many others, on humanities side. I wonder why they didn't just ask for all courses instead of those 10.

Edit: here's a comparison with 2016.



BTW, for those interested, the FOI Forecast linked was really asking about the number of applicants offering 4 or more A-levels. That's also "quite interesting", but be aware the FOI is poorly worded and doesn't really help too much because it doesn't separately identify applicants offering IB or other A-level equivalents.

How come Econ decreased so much? :O

Surely the A*A*A requirements can't put off too many people?

It might well have done. I'm sure I've read somewhere that Economics is particularly bad for attracting 'speculative' applicants (often from overseas) who are nowhere near competitive.

after crushbridge, that sounds surprisingly accurate

How come Econ decreased so much? :O

Surely the A*A*A requirements can't put off too many people?

You wouldn't have thought so given that A*A*A was pretty much the standard offer last year anyway, but yeah strange. And HSPS down bigly too.

Yet UCAS "L" courses (i.e. Social Studies including both Economics & HSPS) are up generally across the UK.

Interesting...