University Entrance Grade Offers

Next year’s intake of bright-eyed and bushy tailed students will now know the grades that they have to achieve in their A-levels to get into Cambridge. In general, the average grade offer for Cambridge is A*AA (380 UCAS Points), which is not much higher than a lot of other Universities in the UK. For example, the average grade offer for studying Biological Sciences at Oxford is AAA, Newcastle and Sheffield is AAB and University of East Anglia is ABB. Thus, in terms of grade offers, it is almost as easy to get into Cambridge as a lot of other Universities. BUT, the reality of the situation is more complex than this since the average grade that is actually achieved by Cambridge students is 559 UCAS Points (almost four A*) and as this is the average, some students must be achieving even higher grades than this. So Cambridge students may well be offered A*AA grades to get into the University but in reality they achieve much higher. Cambridge students out perform their offers.  Thus, the most difficult part is to get a conditional offer in the first place. 

 

So how do admission tutors decide these offers? Academics who interview prospective students have a hard time in identifying the best students as A-level grades have shown an inexorable rise over the last two decades (see Figure). In 2000, the proportion of A grades was 17.8% while in 2010 the proportion of A/A* grades was 27%. What this means in reality is that most students who apply to Cambridge will have very high predicted grades. Thus, the interview is particularly important in trying to identify the students to whom to make an entrance offer. Discriminating between students who are all predicted to get three or four A* is very difficult and every year there are well publicised cases of an A* student who does not get a place. Given the number of exceptional applicants, this is not particularly surprising. So admission tutors cannot really use predicted grades in any discriminating way to make offers. They have to resort to different criteria. I know that some Cambridge colleges obtain the AS exam results of the applicants and will only consider candidates that have achieved better than 90%. Moreover, high grades that are obtained after several re-sits will not carry as much weight as those achieved first time around. It is better to be ready and fully prepared for an exam and achieve your best grade at the first sitting rather than do multiple re-takes. In addition, the way in which the student performs during the interview will be very important in securing an offer.