Cambridge University to introduce written admissions tests

But there should be evidence.

But there should be evidence.

Evidence of what? Cambridge has published plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of A-levels, AS UMS, STEP, TSA, GCSEs etc etc

The only thing they haven't published is effectiveness of interviews, but you can bet they view them as effective otherwise they wouldn't use them so much.

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But there should be evidence.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/02/cambridge-university-to-introduce-written-admissions-tests

Good

A STEP in the right direction...

I thought they already had written admission tests.



Pun.

Evidence of what? Cambridge has published plenty of evidence of the effectiveness of A-levels, AS UMS, STEP, TSA, GCSEs etc etc

The only thing they haven't published is effectiveness of interviews, but you can bet they view them as effective otherwise they wouldn't use them so much.

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I will not spend hours to find the links to all the data and other info Cambridge has published on their website to prove my point for you, but if you're really interested, you can find most of them somewhere on there.

http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/statistics

http://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/admissions-research

http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/applying/what-are-we-looking-for

http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/find-out-more

As @jneill said, they haven't published data for correlation between interview scores and success rate, but if you have a look at all other data available and analyse it correctly, it's not too difficult to see interview performance can play an important role in your success even if your academic record is not as good as some other applicants, or vice versa in a few cases.

Evidence that interviews are effective.

A lot of people who are academically proven get rejected and a lot who fall short on paper get accepted. I can see that Oxford and Cambridge think highly of the interview system. I assume this is evidence-based and I was just wondering what the evidence is.

I'm not aware Cambridge has published any information on the evidence-base behind their interview system? Those links you have posted certainly don't contain any.

I did not say there's a clear/direct correlation between interview performance and success rate. I only said ' interview performance can play an important role in your success even if your academic record is not as good as some other applicants, or vice versa in a few cases.'
Have you looked at all data you could get from the links I posted, not just the ones you can get directly on those pages?
For example, have you looked at this one?

http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/files/publications/ums_attainment_at_as-level_of_applicants_by_subject_and_offer_status.pdf

There're some with very high UMS who didn't get offer while some with lower UMS who did. Don't you think in some cases it was due to good performance at interview that the latter got their offer? (Note: I am NOT saying they're all due to interview performance)

The only point I was trying to make is that by interviewing more than 80% of all applicants, Cambridge (and Oxford to slightly lesser extent because they interview slightly smaller ratio of applicants than Cambridge) give more chance for wider range of students from various schooling background to be assessed more fairly than other universities.

Also, nobody has implied there is correlation between interview performance and tripo performance.

I'm a punny guy



I never expected this of you - its rather mean, I have to say

Humour is integral to maths; sometimes I can't differentiate between maths and jokes.

You are driving me to my limit

http://www.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/Images/109717-medical-and-veterinary-admissions-test-validation-study.pdf

Ah yes, look at this truly outstanding correlation of 0.078 between medicine interview score and Tripos performance. Note especially the slight negative correlation between male students' interview scores and Tripos performance.

(Compare that to the 0.38 correlation between AS UMS and Medicine Tripos performance.)

That's... bizarre. Actually - it could (should) be that the interviews are selecting for other traits than academic excellence (ethics, patient manner, suitability for course) and therefore still a very critical part of the process.

Yep valid point, they make the same point in the paper. Still, would be interesting to see similar data for other subjects. We can't really conclude too much either way when medicine is quite a specific case where arguably non-academic factors play a very crucial role. It's difficult to know how much influence that had.

(That said, Cambridge medicine interviews do tend to be pretty academic. Some apparently are entirely science-based, but mine did have some "why medicine?" etc questions.)

Agreed. To be honest, before I edited I kinda went WTF until I thought about it some more. I'm now curious about what a medicine interview is actually like!

Yeah of course interview performance can play an important role in who gets an offer. I certainly wouldn't dispute that.

But I was fairly sure Pars12 was asking for evidence that interviews were effective at selecting candidates? Whereas the links in your post do not address that. Your post was addressing whether the interview "matters" or not, which of course it does, and Pars12's posts acknowledged that anyway.

Essentially, I think your post was answering a different question to the one Pars12 was asking.