The Student Room Group

Applying for Biomedical Science with AP classes

I take the American curriculum and want to apply to schools in the UK without a foundation year but I’m having a hard time gauging my chances of acceptance.

I wish to study biomedical science at either UCL, Edinburgh, King’s, Manchester, or Queen Mary. Last year I took AP Biology, Psychology and Language and received scores of 554 respectively. This year I’m taking AP Chemistry, environmental science, statistics, computer science principles, and literature.

There are no predicted scores but I can see myself achieving 5s on chemistry and environmental science. I also have really strong extracurriculars with lots of lab work.

However I was told my chances for getting into first year for most of my choices are slim. I was told to just apply for Manchester and Edinburgh first year and the rest foundation. Based on my grades and extracurriculars what are my chances of getting accepted without a foundation year?
Thanks

Reply 1

Hi there!

My best advice to you would be to contact the admissions teams for each University as your qualifications won't be the standard A-level, especially if you will not have predicted grades to apply with. The admissions staff will have all the entry requirements for different qualifications for each course and will be able to tell you what their standard offer for you would be, and then you can determine if you would require a foundation year from that!

In many cases, if you apply for a foundation year but end up meeting the requirements for the first year straight away, you can normally be moved onto the first year of the course and skip the foundation year - but this might be worth checking with the individual Universities as well :smile:

Most Uni websites will have their admissions teams contact information easily findable, whether it be an email address or a phone number - if this isn't the case then you could always contact the course enquiries teams and speak to the Biomed course leaders instead.

Good luck!
Jorja (LJMU Student Rep)

Reply 2

Original post
by ananas-
I take the American curriculum and want to apply to schools in the UK without a foundation year but I’m having a hard time gauging my chances of acceptance.
I wish to study biomedical science at either UCL, Edinburgh, King’s, Manchester, or Queen Mary. Last year I took AP Biology, Psychology and Language and received scores of 554 respectively. This year I’m taking AP Chemistry, environmental science, statistics, computer science principles, and literature.
There are no predicted scores but I can see myself achieving 5s on chemistry and environmental science. I also have really strong extracurriculars with lots of lab work.
However I was told my chances for getting into first year for most of my choices are slim. I was told to just apply for Manchester and Edinburgh first year and the rest foundation. Based on my grades and extracurriculars what are my chances of getting accepted without a foundation year?
Thanks

If I'm being honest , your chances and very slim to zero , after you have don't so much to that level , the mean problem I can see here , your mixing up many subjected aren't deleted into terms of reality jobs , for example , if you wish to work into laboratory of blood sciences , you need to take only a package of subjects that you will use into work place in reality not just taking course randomly as you did , e.d if your targeting to work in laboratory of chemistry/haematology , you need to concentrate on chemistry , biology ,physics and maths , in O levels , then you apply for biomedical science at university and then you would find the other many subjects withing into that course which will give more options to divert into careers , but now I can see you have don't each career like one subjects for each and not enough for specialise on it either , too many course you have don't aren't related at all , I'm sorry but you can't confuse the study system that they should give you a place while you haven't got enough package for particular course they can take you on .

Reply 3

Original post
by kedress
If I'm being honest , your chances and very slim to zero , after you have don't so much to that level , the mean problem I can see here , your mixing up many subjected aren't deleted into terms of reality jobs , for example , if you wish to work into laboratory of blood sciences , you need to take only a package of subjects that you will use into work place in reality not just taking course randomly as you did , e.d if your targeting to work in laboratory of chemistry/haematology , you need to concentrate on chemistry , biology ,physics and maths , in O levels , then you apply for biomedical science at university and then you would find the other many subjects withing into that course which will give more options to divert into careers , but now I can see you have don't each career like one subjects for each and not enough for specialise on it either , too many course you have don't aren't related at all , I'm sorry but you can't confuse the study system that they should give you a place while you haven't got enough package for particular course they can take you on .

Having irrelevant subject qualifications has no impact on the application process as far as I'm aware. If anything it helps.

Reply 4

hi, i’m also a us student who applied with aps! first of all, for sciences, most competitive unis only accept certain aps (the schools you have listed). most will not view environmental sciences, psychology, stats or computer science as ‘sciences’ as they are content-based (and less rigorous to a levels) and on low bands of the ap band scales. for sciences the ones normally accepted are: biology, chemistry, calculus bc, the physics cs (and often physics 1/2 as they are quite rigorous and physics 2 has a lot of medical applications) - i’m pretty sure this is documented on the ucl website. any other aps would likely not be looked at as they aren’t subject-specific.

i was in a similar predicament to you senior year, i’ve since received offers from kcl, cambridge, ucl, durham and edinburgh, and my advice would be to try and change your subjects to more relevant and rigorous ones! for the best possible chances, i would get rid of lit, csp and es (as they wont look at them anyway), and try to do calc and physics instead (potentially using the summer for prerequisites?). the uk is very subject focused, so doing ones unrelated to your major may even decrease your chances as it can show that you aren’t as serious about your degree. id also recommend looking into edinburgh/ maybe other scottish unis as the system is more similar to us and its 4 years so they go over introductory stuff more, so previous knowledge doesn’t matter as much. also, extracurricular don’t really matter at all so i’d focus more on scores. good luck! :smile:)

Reply 5

Original post
by camuskitten
hi, i’m also a us student who applied with aps! first of all, for sciences, most competitive unis only accept certain aps (the schools you have listed). most will not view environmental sciences, psychology, stats or computer science as ‘sciences’ as they are content-based (and less rigorous to a levels) and on low bands of the ap band scales. for sciences the ones normally accepted are: biology, chemistry, calculus bc, the physics cs (and often physics 1/2 as they are quite rigorous and physics 2 has a lot of medical applications) - i’m pretty sure this is documented on the ucl website. any other aps would likely not be looked at as they aren’t subject-specific.
i was in a similar predicament to you senior year, i’ve since received offers from kcl, cambridge, ucl, durham and edinburgh, and my advice would be to try and change your subjects to more relevant and rigorous ones! for the best possible chances, i would get rid of lit, csp and es (as they wont look at them anyway), and try to do calc and physics instead (potentially using the summer for prerequisites?). the uk is very subject focused, so doing ones unrelated to your major may even decrease your chances as it can show that you aren’t as serious about your degree. id also recommend looking into edinburgh/ maybe other scottish unis as the system is more similar to us and its 4 years so they go over introductory stuff more, so previous knowledge doesn’t matter as much. also, extracurricular don’t really matter at all so i’d focus more on scores. good luck! :smile:)


Hey so I ended up applying for first year and got offers from all the schools I wanted. The one with the highest requirements was UCL with them asking me for four 5s with two from bio and chem. So it all ended up working out 🙏🏼 just need to achieve those scores on my exams

Reply 6

Original post
by ananas-
Hey so I ended up applying for first year and got offers from all the schools I wanted. The one with the highest requirements was UCL with them asking me for four 5s with two from bio and chem. So it all ended up working out 🙏🏼 just need to achieve those scores on my exams

congrats! that’s insane good luck!

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