How is a Cambridge applicant compared to the rest of their cohort?

Yeah they say that but realistically what is going to happen? Are they just going to give out offers to people with 10/10 at interview and 9.0 on the admission assessment?

Cambridge is full of white, rich, posh people.

My college wants my all my AS raw marks, even for english which I've dropped XD. When I asked them if they asses candidates based on them they said they want the most info possible so maybe it will be just seeing if A* predictions are accurate. I got 15% above boundary in physics and 20% in chem but if I had got the same mark on this years a-level papers, I would have gotten A* in chem and just missed A* in physics although maybe the a-level papers had less awkward questions.

Really? which college?

Yeah they say that but realistically what is going to happen? Are they just going to give out offers to people with 10/10 at interview and 9.0 on the admission assessment?

Yes maybe so, but for the mass majority of applicants without UMS/AS... my point resides

What specifically is used to determine who is more competitive than other candidates? How do Cambridge justify that one applicant is a stronger applicant than another, if they don't have the same measures of strengths. What if one applicant doesn't have AS where as another one does (with strong raw marks), how do they decide who is stronger then? Are applicants simply compared by their GCSEs?

The reason I'm asking is because Cambridge states you are compared with the the rest of the cohort, but what does this mean exactly...

My college wants my all my AS raw marks, even for english which I've dropped XD. When I asked them if they asses candidates based on them they said they want the most info possible so maybe it will be just seeing if A* predictions are accurate. I got 15% above boundary in physics and 20% in chem but if I had got the same mark on this years a-level papers, I would have gotten A* in chem and just missed A* in physics although maybe the a-level papers had less awkward questions.

Interesting. I wonder how many people applying to Christa did linear AS, and whether or not they will still ask for it next year.

Actually, I think you'll find that Cambridge is under pressure from the government to meet government targets for percentage intake of BME and state students. If anyone is being discriminated against at Cambridge, it'll be white, independently- educated students (the government would like to see their numbers at Cambridge reduced)

And it's quite possible other colleges also ask for it this year (some did last year) and will do so again next year.

But they don't use raw marks in quite the same way as UMS.

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So what you're saying is some colleges won't continue asking them (e.g. next year) as fewer applicants are doing AS?

But they are still taken account of right? It's not like high marks in linear AS are going to make or break an application, but I'd thought that they'd probably be pretty useful still (more useful than GCSE, considering Cambridge care a lot about your recent academic progress, i.e AS)

The fact the govt needs to pressure Cambridge to let in more BMEs shows the selection criteria used by the university is not picking the best candidates.

https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/files/publications/undergrad_admissions_statistics_2016_cycle.pdf

You can look at the backgrounds of all 2016 entrants in the above document on the Cambridge University website. The vast majority of entrants are state educated.

For applications from Home students attending UK schools/colleges the proportions of acceptances by school/college type are:
Maintained 62.5% (62.0% in the previous cycle)
Independent 37.5% (38.0% in the previous cycle)

Cambridge has the problem that they desperately want to increase the number of state and BME students (especially black students) to meet government targets and so avoid losing £millions in funding, but they have to balance this requirement with the need to maintain standards of entry to stay at the top of world rankings. The two are often incompatible.

The students who lose out are the privately educated white male students who Cambridge are forced to discriminate against. Discrimination is bad whichever way you look at it.

According to official stats around 30% of applicants in 2016 were from a BME background which is way in excess in of their representation in the general UK population. I therefore think it is unfair to suggest that BME applicants are slow in coming forward.

I also think is is unhelpful to foster the impression that Cambridge is somehow discriminating against BME students in their admissions process, when in fact the reverse would seem to be the case.

I think you'll find that 30% includes Internationals. And if it doesn't it's the black community that is definitely underapplying. And unfortunately if they do apply they tend to be less successful at getting offers than average.

But yes agreed. They definitely don't discriminate against.

Edit: here's the data...


One small victory... more black students admitted than Etonians...

https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/13366

One also has to think about the courses people choose to apply to. Students from under-represented backgrounds disproportionately apply to come of the most competitive courses.