IB applicants disadvantaged at LSE?

I may be wrong, but looking at LSE offer infos on TSR, included an XL spreadsheet around, I get the impression that IB applicants might as well not bother... would you agree?

Reply 1

Admit-One

Universities Forum Helper

How many IB respondents are there on the sheet compared to AL?

Reply 2

Torrades

Original post by Admit-One

How many IB respondents are there on the sheet compared to AL?

Hi, thanks for replying. Have a look...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1z-sn6vGYx2pc-BqN5bGup8E9wlCC8q0-F9kE5O-287w/htmlview

Reply 3

aloexo

Don’t think that’s the case. Offer rate is lower for internationals in general, so that probably contributes.

Reply 4

Admit-One

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by Torrades

Hi, thanks for replying. Have a look...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1z-sn6vGYx2pc-BqN5bGup8E9wlCC8q0-F9kE5O-287w/htmlview

Thanks for the link. Having a look through the data, my short answer is that I disagree with your original statement, (that IB candidates are at a disadvantage), and if anything I think AL students have a tougher job getting an offer. But this comes with quite a few caveats.

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I'm going purely off the info on the sheet, which may/may not be correct.

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Rejections could be due to weaker profiles at GCSE or equiv, which isn't captured

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Rejections could be due to lack of FM or other essential / strongly preferred subject

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The sheet isn't well formed for doing any accurate analysis

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We don't know acurately who received a contextual offer, (which will be weighted towards Home + AL students)

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Thre's probably some selection bias where people only seek out and complete the sheet when they are in a grump.

And just to note that I:

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Discounted anyone not taking IB or AL

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Discounted anyone where is wasn't clearly an offer or rej - an amazing amount of academically capable students don't know how to fill in a spreadsheet

There were about 720 clear decisions on the sheet. I ignored the 90 or so rejections which were specifically due to their personal statement or LNAT result. This left circa 400 offers and 200 rejections. A decent sample size, but there were many more AL candidates than IB.

Just eyeballing it, I thought there was a very even split of Home and International for both offers and rejections. Bad news for conspiracy theorists who think LSE chases International fees, or hates International students for reasons.

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The highest prediced AL grades that were rejected were A*A*A*A*, and it was not uncommon at all for candidates with multiple A*'s to be rejected

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As you might expect, a few 45/45 candidates were rej for IB as well

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The lowest AL grades that got an offer were AAA + A in EPQ, whilst the lowest IB was 40.

So broadly-speaking I think things are very comparable, and I didn't see anything that stood out comparing AL to IB candidates. The only real conclusion I could make is that there is a decent weighting to either the PS or prior quals as there were a lot of outstanding candidates for both IB and AL who were unsuccessful.

Some rough grade breakdowns:

AL vs IB at LSE 2023-24.jpg

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IB applicants disadvantaged at LSE?

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