The Student Room Group

Imperial offer but reject by st andrews ???

Predicted 4A* Physics maths FM chemistry

applied for physics
got an imperial offer but rejected by st andrews?? a bit confusued, cuz im applying as home student, could that be a massive factor ??? anyone else in the same situation as me ?
Original post by Porch
Predicted 4A* Physics maths FM chemistry

applied for physics
got an imperial offer but rejected by st andrews?? a bit confusued, cuz im applying as home student, could that be a massive factor ??? anyone else in the same situation as me ?

Why is that confusing? Did you expect that St. Andrews would be less discerning than Imperial?
Reply 2
Original post by DataVenia
Why is that confusing? Did you expect that St. Andrews would be less discerning than Imperial?

Kinda yes to be honest ,
1) imperial being one of the best in UK for science
2) St Andrews isn’t that good for science and also with a lower entry requirement.
Reply 3
Different Unis want different things and assess applications in entirely different ways.

Imperial is not the 'gold standard' for Physics or any other subject so why would it automatically follow that every other Uni would follow their lead. Are you disappointed about St Andrews specifically, or just because you assumed they would make you an offer?
Original post by Porch
Kinda yes to be honest ,
1) imperial being one of the best in UK for science
2) St Andrews isn’t that good for science and also with a lower entry requirement.

What has given you the impression that "St Andrews isn’t that good for science"?

There are lots of issues with league tables (they don't necessarily measure what's important to you, they can move around significantly from year to year, different tables can contradict each other, small differences in the raw numbers can cause large differences in rankings, etc.) but the first league table I just checked shows that for Physics and Astronomy St. Andrews at 93.0% (ranked 9th) and Imperial at 93.6% (ranked 6th). A 0.6% difference is not significant. Also, the only individual measure where Imperial scored higher than St. Andrews was "Graduate prospects - outcomes".

Complete University Guide - Physics and Astronomy - 2024.JPG

In fact, if you look at the little red/green triangles, you see that Imperial dropped one place this year (so it was 5th last year) whilst St. Andrews dropped 7 places (so it was 2nd last year). Hence my "they can move around significantly from year to year" comment above.

(This is from The Complete University Guide, 2024 rankings for Physics and Astronomy, here.)

BTW, according to their Methodology page, the data used for the "Graduate prospects - outcomes" was the 2019-20 Graduate Outcomes survey which takes place fifteen months after graduation. So it's not exactly bang up-to-date information anyway.
Reply 5
Perhaps Imperial compensates for a higher offer rate by having higher entry requirements, whereas St Andrew's, with their somewhat lower entry requirements, know that if they give an offer then the applicant is more likely to meet it. So they have to be stricter with who they give out offers to.

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