Ask the Admissions Teams - Results Day 2020

Thanks for your response. I should point out that I am not an Admissions Tutor and it is likely that any response from Christ's or Murray Edwards will also be a member of the Admissions Office team, rather than an Admissions Tutor. This means we are not the people who get the final say in decisions.

Oxford are indeed subject to the same number controls we are. Individual colleges at Cambridge haven't had this imposed on them, but the idea is that everyone works collectively to ensure we don't breach the number controls as a university. I don't know how many more students Worcester took than normal (if they did - they may have had fewer state school offer holders than normal) but if they took significantly more, then their actions puts pressure on other colleges not to accept those one or two more students they might like to have taken.

I am a little confused about your statement regarding medical offers. We will not have made fewer offers this year than the number of students we accepted last year - from our application statistics webpage, I can see that we made 323 offers last year and accepted 281 students. This year we made 306 offers. Our intake target total is 313 (https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/funding-for-providers/health-education-funding/medical-and-dental-target-intakes/). I cannot tell, but I would expect that both years' figures include offers made for deferred entry also. I would expect that this year slightly fewer offers were made with the expectation that we would find some excellent medics in Adjustment.

We took students from Adjustment this year, yes. To be eligible for Cambridge Adjustment, students have to meet Widening Participation criteria (list here), exceed the offer made by their firm choice of university and meet or exceed the typical grades requested by Cambridge for their course. Crucially, they also have to have applied to Cambridge, sat any Admissions Assessments and been interviewed.

We started this scheme last year to address the number of students from underrepresented backgrounds who we were failing to make offers to but were nonetheless going to on achieve highly at A Level. By definition, these students have faced more disadvantage, in social and economic terms, than most Cambridge applicants. We believe that giving them a second shot when they do well is the right thing to do.

As for the Summer Pool, academics will take students other than those they have interviewed for several reasons. The primary one is that we want the best students, regardless of which College they have applied to. This is an utterly hypothetical example, but if we had an offer holder for Music who had achieved A*AB and there was another in the Summer Pool who had achieved A*AA but missed the offer made to them by their College (which may have been an A* in a specific subject or A*A*A), we would likely be interested in them. Our academics trust their colleagues' opinions of students and have their interview reports available, as well as the rest of the file, when making decisions about offer holders. The interview is only one piece of information about an offer holder and when a file goes into either Pool (Winter or Summer), it contains as much information about the applicant and their context as those assessing the applicant/offer holder at their original college has seen.

I hope this helps. Having seen your posts today, I hope your daughter will be very happy at Fitzwilliam. I have no doubt that she will be.

My son was rejected from the summer pool. Will move forward to enjoy a new study experience at IC.
Our sincere thanks to the great efforts of the admission team and volunteers.

Thanks. My apologies for calling tutors vs office. Shoes my ignorance of a dad from Essex who went to a poly. I didn’t realise the difference.

Thank you for the explanation. Sorry I wasn’t clear on my offer point. Look at Pembroke for Med. last year they accepted more than this years offers. Hence, why couldn’t they take them all?

Who wouldn’t fully support the adjustment route, but I do not understand if you’ve interviewed and like them, why not just offer them anyway? Why let them apply elsewhere and comeback? Clearly again I’m missing something

As for her being happy. Time will tell that tale buT it wasn’t the college she picked, location wanted, loved, made friends at. The biggest saving grace is she is lucky in that she is doing the she wanted where sadly many others aren’t through no fault of their own.

Thanks
R.S.

Not ignorance at all - some of these accounts were at one time managed by Admissions Tutors. I thought I'd make the point to clarify more generally that we don't have the power over decisions.

I would suspect that Pembroke over-offered last year and have been asked to rein in their Medicine offers this year. There is much more centralised control over the number of offers that can be made in Medicine than any other subject. When you look at the last five years, they have accepted 8 per year. They took 9 last year, so I suspect that were aware that they had overshot and were asked to make fewer offers. As I said in my above post, they will only accept all of their offer holders if they do not think that there are better/more deserving offer holders in the Pool or in Adjustment.

If we offered to all Adjustment eligible applicants, we would be well over our cover ratio or would have to offer to fewer more advantaged students, who have performed better overall. The majority of them would not go on to meet their offers, which would cause more problems than it would solve. It also helps iron out doubts we might have about whether these applicants will meet the typical offer - sometimes Directors of Studies and Admissions Tutors are worried they will not make the offer and choose another excellent student for greater certainty. It may also be that these students didn't perform quite as strongly in interview or in their assessment as others and even when the context of their background is taken into account, so they are not made offers.

As for your daughter, I have spent four years working at a college which takes a significant proportion of its students from the pools. Was it most people's first choice? No. Did they love it by the end of their first term and not want to leave? Yes. I would recommend that she joins any Facebook groups they have, follows their instagram account and approaches it as positively as she can. Best of luck!

Why is it i was entered into the summer pool but picked my the same college anyhow? I received 2 A*s and 2As but the A* was in a different subject to that required. However the same college I applied to put in a pool and then selected me

@Peterhouse Admissions

What will the university do if England decides to U-turn A-level results like Scotland and now Wales have done?

It absolutely sucks but basing results on inflated predictions is not fair to past or future students. Not sure what else they were expected to do. I think its impossible to think of a solution where students who would have achieved the necessary results and thrived at their chosen university would be rewarded but at the same time avoiding students going to university with inflated grades and struggling. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that would be far worse.

I think it's much fairer than using the results of the algorithm which is so terrible that it's pretty much random. Yes, it's a bit unfair to applicants for 2021 if there are more than usual deferrals, but equally they might "unfairly" benefit if (as seems likely) numbers of EU applicants drop after the fee status changes.

It absolutely sucks but basing results on inflated predictions is not fair to past or future students. Not sure what else they were expected to do. I think its impossible to think of a solution where students who would have achieved the necessary results and thrived at their chosen university would be rewarded but at the same time avoiding students going to university with inflated grades and struggling. There's plenty of evidence to suggest that would be far worse.

Did you read the post I linked? The way it was tested was complete nonsense, and given the relatively low accuracy from the "validation" method they did use I don't think it's at all clear that the results produced would be significantly more accurate than just using the CAGs. Certainly it seems very implausible that judgements for the thing we actually care about (suitability for Cambridge) based on algorithm-produced grades would be more accurate than those made by admissions tutors based on CAGs and factors not used in the algorithm such as performance at GCSE, admissions tests and interviews.

For students having to resit in Autumn due to their centre assessed grades, will this be looked down upon or will their application be seen as weaker?

As I said, comparing the 'fairness' of acceptances nationally should not be applied to Cambridge. I know several people who were accepted to Cambridge after not being given the results they 'deserved'.

In my interview at Cambridge the interviewers made a point of asking how I expected to achieve the required results given I was at such a poorly performing school. I know they factored all this in. There's a reason we aspired to go to one of the brightest universities in the world, they do things logically.

I have been following Cambridge threads for best part of year now, but never felt compelled to post here until now.

While individuals monitoring some accounts like @Peterhouse Admissions have been legends, I am afraid the university is not as diligent and fool-proof as you believe it to be. Quite to the contrary.

When my son couldn't make it in January, we asked for feedback. It turns out that the feedback was for a completely different individual from different school though the letter was purportedly about my son, addressed to his teacher and posted to his school. We know this because halfway through the letter it mentioned the name of that different individual.

Perhaps a bit of a leap, but it raises the possibility that perhaps my son was rejected because they looked at the file of a completely different individual.

We let it go: perhaps the letter was an innocent mistake by Cambridge and my son really wasn't up to the mark. And if Cambridge really did mess up between two candidates then what's the point of going to a university that makes such fundamental mistakes?

As it happens he was offered a place by another equally good university, and got in even before today's government u-turn.

In summary: Oxbridge are not infallible. Incompetence can be found everywhere, even at Cambridge.

The college in question shall remain unnamed. Suffice it to say that it is one of the smaller colleges across the road from Peterhouse. :-)

Hi there! If you haven't already let the College know, I'd recommend you do. It sounds like they attached the wrong file or named it wrong. This is an easy mistake to make and can happen to the best of us!

I have been following Cambridge threads for best part of year now, but never felt compelled to post here until now.

While individuals monitoring some accounts like @Peterhouse Admissions have been legends, I am afraid the university is not as diligent and fool-proof as you believe it to be. Quite to the contrary.

When my son couldn't make it in January, we asked for feedback. It turns out that the feedback was for a completely different individual from different school though the letter was purportedly about my son, addressed to his teacher and posted to his school. We know this because halfway through the letter it mentioned the name of that different individual.

Perhaps a bit of a leap, but it raises the possibility that perhaps my son was rejected because they looked at the file of a completely different individual.

We let it go: perhaps the letter was an innocent mistake by Cambridge and my son really wasn't up to the mark. And if Cambridge really did mess up between two candidates then what's the point of going to a university that makes such fundamental mistakes?

As it happens he was offered a place by another equally good university, and got in even before today's government u-turn.

In summary: Oxbridge are not infallible. Incompetence can be found everywhere, even at Cambridge.

The college in question shall remain unnamed. Suffice it to say that it is one of the smaller colleges across the road from Peterhouse. :-)