personal statement too academic

Uni isn't all academics, they want you to be a rounded individual. Uni can get tough, they want to know you have some sort of hobbies and outlets to turn to - no point taking in students who are all purely academics, get stressed out and end up burning out. Also, unis will have lots of different sports, societies, volunteering opportunities etc that they obviously want students involved in as much as possible, so if you show some extracurricular interests that may suggest you'd be willing to do that and not just work work work.

I was at a Russel Group Uni Open Day today where an admissions tutor told us he never gets to see most personal statements, only ones where the applicant is doing non-traditional exams. He claims offers are made on the basis of grades in nearly all cases and the stress of writing a Personal Statement is a waste of time.

well thats just brilliant after i spent so long on it! but thanks for sharing, thats kinda scary that they focus mostly on grades

What that user said is definitely not true for the top top unis, which most of the RG unis don’t fall into. Universities like Oxbridge, LSE, UCL, Imperial (The G5) absolutely scrutinise your personal statement and hope for an academic one - they don’t care for extracurriculars which aren’t directly related to your course, especially for the more academic courses. The Personal Statement is one of the key differentiating factors between applicants at these unis since nearly all applicants to these type of universities will have almost perfect or perfect grades, leaving little differentiation between grades.

For lower ranked unis, this may apply since very few applicants will be applying with 3 or 4 A*’s, who they’ll immediately give an offer to. The offer rate for these unis will also be considerably higher since they’ll be a safety uni for most applicants and not their firm choice.

Not necessarily. LSE is well known to be PS heavy, but both Oxford and Cambridge admissions tutors have expressed the PS is not the most important factor as a) they are aware in many cases it's hard to know for certain a given PS is an applicants own writing and b) they have admissions tests and interviews which are probably more sensitive measures of the academic qualities they are looking for. UCL hard to say, probably course dependent.

Tbf I definitely agree with Oxbridge, the admissions tests and interviews manages to filter out a lot of applicants. But what they said about the PS being a waste of time and unis only looking at grades (those that don't take admissions tests/interviews) without even reading the statements is surely pretty incorrect and unapplicable to most universities. LSE for example probably receives 900-1000 applicants with perfect grades for it's most oversubscribed courses, with only around 250 places and 400 or so offers to give out, the PS would be the determining factor since they don't interview and I think UCL would be the same with it's most competitive courses.

I think LSE is really the outlier here - they're well known to be much more PS heavy than any other uni. UCL I'm sure they read them although I'm skeptical about how much difference they make - there aren't many anecdotal accounts of people being advised on feedback they were rejected due to their PS from UCL.

Everywhere I've seen where people talk about specific unis which are PS heavy, they tend to group UCL with LSE too. You're right though, the proportion of candidates that have been given their PS as a reason for rejection seems to be considerably higher with the latter.

I've never heard that mentioned on TSR the entire time I've been on here about UCL, only LSE.

Also for the n=1 case I don't think my PS was especially notable (not to mention I committed the cardinal sin of horrible spacing/line break usage i.e. minimal) and I got into UCL - plus I was applying to a very small course in a very small department as a mature student with somewhat varied educational background, so by all accounts my PS would've been scrutinised more on those bases.

Outside of LSE I think it really does suffice to just write generally about your interests in the course and focus on expressing a genuine interest in it, rather than feigned one, while maintaining good spelling/grammar.

Yeah I haven't seen it mentioned on TSR either, but a few times on the 6thForm sub on Reddit.

What do you mean by horrible spacing and line break usage? Doesn't UCAS make it just a large block of text, since each empty line for paragraph spacing counts as a line on the UCAS system, which means that you can't utilise the 4k characters unless you remove these blank lines? So what was the horrible spacing like?

You're expected to use line breaks and balance your structure and length with that in mind...I was able to cut some to add in some line breaks but confess did leave a few megaparagraphs in there lol.

But no you aren't meant to just submit it as a giant monolith of text, although it's not uncommon for people to do so...

I was at a Russel Group Uni Open Day today where an admissions tutor told us he never gets to see most personal statements, only ones where the applicant is doing non-traditional exams. He claims offers are made on the basis of grades in nearly all cases and the stress of writing a Personal Statement is a waste of time.

What that user said is definitely not true for the top top unis, which most of the RG unis don’t fall into. Universities like Oxbridge, LSE, UCL, Imperial (The G5) absolutely scrutinise your personal statement and hope for an academic one - they don’t care for extracurriculars which aren’t directly related to your course, especially for the more academic courses. The Personal Statement is one of the key differentiating factors between applicants at these unis since nearly all applicants to these type of universities will have almost perfect or perfect grades, leaving little differentiation between grades.

For lower ranked unis, this may apply since very few applicants will be applying with 3 or 4 A*’s, who they’ll immediately give an offer to. The offer rate for these unis will also be considerably higher since they’ll be a safety uni for most applicants and not their firm choice.

I have read at Oxford and work for a top ten institution and most places, including Oxon, don't care very much about them unless you are a non-traditional entrant.

I did my Bachelor's PS in about an hour. Not worth fretting over.

It is the main point of assessment for LSE though, undoubtedly.

I’d wager that most courses in the UK (by volume) don’t score the PS closely. It may get a quick sense check but broadly speaking it won’t commonly be a key part of the offer making process.

I work in RG admissions and I reckon maybe 10% of our undergrad courses score the PS. The bulk of offer making is grade based.

Which is not to say that you shouldn’t draft a decent PS because a) you don’t know which of your choices might use it, b) it may come into play on results day if you miss your offer and c) it’s a good thought exercise for the applicant. If they are really struggling then it may not be the right subject.

Let's say you have 5 set paragraphs in Word, but when you paste it into UCAS, the actual blank lines are removed, and instead the way it is formatted is that when a paragraph ends, the line on which the last sentence of the paragraph was ends early, and a new line starts with the next text.
For example to make it clearer, if you have a paragraph which ends on line 26/47, the 26th line would end early and look half full, and the next paragraph would start on line 27. If you wanted a blank line between the paragraphs, ie. the 27th line to be blank, then it would add more lines and go over the line limit of 47. I was confused with this before sending my application off, and online people had said to just remove the blank lines, so you can keep the content.

Is what I described fine or should you actually have blank lines in between, but that would limit you to only around 3300 characters? I probably haven't asked my question in the clearest way but it's difficult to explain what I'm trying to say. Whenever I did see this question asked though, there were always varying responses.