Take our quiz to find out what your revision personality is! >>

Can I still get into oxbridge if I take a non-facilitating subject?

I'm currently trying to decide what to take for A levels. I want to study Spanish + German at uni. For my a levels, I know that I want to take Spanish and German but for my 3rd subject I really want to take politics but would it put me at a disadvantage if I were to apply to oxford/cambridge?

Reply 1

Clearing and Applications Advisor

Universities scrapped the facilitating subject lists years ago because they were misleading. They were designed to help people with no idea what degree they wanted to study to keep their options open so completely irrelevant to someone who knows they want to study ML.

Politics would be an advantage for MLs.

Reply 2

amy_alevels

Original post by unclear-eyelid

Hi! I'm a first year studying Spanish and Portuguese at Oxford :smile:

Lovely to see people thinking of continuing with languages.

As the other commenter mentioned, facilitating subjects lists can be misleading, and I think a good way to go about it is to consider the skills from the third subject that might help you with your A Levels and the course at Oxford. If you are interested in the subject and are prepared to get the grades in it to meet the entry requirements, go for it! Even better if you can see the link to your interest in languages :smile:

I took Spanish, English lit, and Maths (completely unrelated, see!) so you can arguably find subjects less relevant to languages and humanities. I personally find that having done English lit helps me a lot now with the heavy literature content in my course, but it is completely personal preference and admissions is not done through a rule book.

Maths did give me a nice break from essay writing subjects too! So there are lots of things to consider when choosing your subjects. Don't forget that for Oxford there are lots of aspects to your application like interviews and entrance exams that will be considered aside from your A Level combination.

Last thing, there's a modern languages open day in Oxford sometime early in May, so perhaps consider getting to that if you can. I didn't go as I didn't know about it for my year + I live quite a distance away, so no worries if not.

Lmk if you have any questions!

Reply 3

McGinger

What do you want to study at Uni - and have you checked the entry requirements on a range of Uni websites for that subject?

Start there. They will clearly state any 'required' or 'preferred' subjects. Unis have to be totally up-front and honest about this - there are no secrets that only 'special people' know. As above, 'facilitating subjects' got dumped years ago - so ignore any teachers or school staff still wittering on about this, and do your own research into what each Uni does actually want.