For many pupils sitting exams this summer the next few weeks of cramming will be aimed at one thing – securing a university place. But, for universities, admissions decisions have become about far more than exam grades.
Changes to A-levels, combined with ambitious government targets to raise the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds, greater competition for the highest achieving students and worries about league table positioning are making the admissions process increasingly complex. “A lot more is happening now than someone looking at a bunch of applications and making a decision,” says Janet Graham, director of Supporting Professionalism in Admissions (SPA), which offers advice to universities. “They have to know much more than they used to.”
In many ways, these changes have put applicants in a more favourable position. For many courses and universities the chief difficulty is not deciding between multiple applicants but ensuring they have enough. A fall in the number of 18-year-olds in the UK is projected to continue for the next six years. At the same time, the government has lifted its cap on the number of students each institution can recruit, which has left many scrabbling for the top applicants. This means candidates can be fairly confident of gaining a place somewhere.
But there are still many courses – architecture at Cambridge, maths at Warwick, physics at Imperial College London, mechanical engineering at Bath, medicine almost anywhere – where competition for places remains fierce, and often stronger than ever. Applications to Oxford have increased over the past 10 years from 13,000 to more than 19,000 for 3,200 undergraduate places.
Universities have had to rethink admissions procedures and find new ways to select students. They must mostly still make an offer of a place before they know a student’s grades, after numerous failed attempts to introduce a post-qualifications system. But research by the Cambridge Assessment exam group shows that most A-level predictions made by teachers are wrong. It suggests accuracy has fallen since the removal last year of the majority of January exams, which teachers had used to help their predictions. And further changes to A-level courses over the next few years are likely to make predictions even harder, particularly with the removal of AS-levels as part of A-level courses, which has led to some schools dropping them altogether.
Mary Curnock Cook, Ucas chief executive, revealed earlier this year that more than half of students accepted on to degree courses had missed their required results by two or more grades.
Increased competition for applicants means more universities are also making unconditional offers – although some question the wisdom of telling 17-year-olds halfway through a course that their final results won’t matter – and the University of Reading announced in February that if applicants missed their offer by one A-level grade it would still guarantee admission.
An applicant’s GCSE results remain important to universities, but Paul Teulon, director of admissions and registry services at King’s College London, argues some students can change significantly between GCSE and A-level, which is why he is concerned about the loss of AS-levels. He sees them as a way of students exploring where their strengths and interests really lie: “How easy will it be for students who change their minds, who make a false start?”
The loss of AS-levels has been felt particularly by Cambridge which, unusually, used a detailed breakdown of AS grades in its admissions decision making. As a result it announced it will be setting its own admissions tests for all candidates from next year.
“AS-levels have been a source of information that has been really, really useful and we are sad to see it go,” says Sam Lucy, director of admissions of the Cambridge colleges.
Cambridge is not alone in opting for entrance exams. Oxford already sets its own tests in most subjects and SPA is investigating whether more universities will follow. It is researching the extent to which institutions already use their own tests, what value they add and how well applicants and their advisers understand them. It plans to publish preliminary findings in June.
“There probably will be some people doing this [introducing their own tests],” says Graham. “There is a lot of uncertainty about the new qualifications.”
Simon Beeston, director of Cambridge Assessment’s admissions testing service, which is developing the new tests for Cambridge, says it has seen renewed interest in admissions testing and will launch a new admissions test for maths in November for Durham and other universities.
The number of universities listed on Ucas’s website that set additional tests for applicants already ranges from computer animation arts at Bournemouth University to engineering at Edinburgh. They are common in most law schools and in nursing to test for skills beyond those involved in GCSE.
Beeston says admissions tests help show that institutions are committed to selecting the best candidates, and that candidates are committed enough to take an extra test. “There is a benefit for students and parents as well, because an investment in higher education is exactly that these days,” he says. “You want to know you are likely to do well on a course before you incur £50,000 worth of debt.”
But others are concerned about the implications for social mobility, especially since the announcement by David Cameron that he wants to double the number of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds entering higher education by 2020.
“For admissions you don’t want to put up barriers,” says Graham. “Anyone who does these things has to be very careful.”
Beeston says his organisation, a not-for-profit, non-teaching department of Cambridge University, has tried to address the potential unfairness of some schools and companies tutoring applicants for the tests, by making as much learning support material as possible freely available online.
Bur Steven Jones, senior lecturer at the Manchester Institute of Education, Manchester University, says: “The more unregulated it is the more it becomes a game and the more strategies become important. In the long term that advantages established institutions and students from advantaged backgrounds.”
He has conducted research into personal statements that shows they are heavily weighted in favour of those from advantaged backgrounds and argues interviews can be similarly problematic because interviewers tend to look for candidates with similar qualities to themselves.
Jones’s research found some institutions in the Netherlands and Greece dealt with this difficulty by using a lottery system to admit students who reached a certain academic level, but he suggests one of the fairest ways of distinguishing applicants is through so-called contextual admissions – assessing candidates’ performances in GCSEs and A-levels in the light of detailed data about their schooling and backgrounds.
This is becoming an increasingly important part of the university admissions process as data collection and analysis improve and evidence emerges that students from disadvantaged backgrounds often do better than more advantaged peers with the same entry qualifications.
At Oxford, Samina Khan, director of undergraduate admissions and outreach, says Oxford admissions officers will look at the Ofsted reports of the schools that applicants attended, including whether they have had teacher shortages or been in special measures, and will speak to teachers if they feel they need more details about a candidate.
Teulon says the government’s lifting of the cap on student numbers has made it easier to use contextual admissions, because taking a candidate with lower grades no longer means rejecting another, suitably qualified, from a more advantaged background. But Jones says university league tables, which often take account of average entry requirements, can deter institutions from this.
A report published last week by the Institute for Fiscal Studies linking graduates’ earnings to what and where they studied could add another complication. If the employment and salary prospects of their graduates become a key measure of universities’ success, as the government suggests they should, admissions officers could come under further pressure to admit those most likely to earn well. And the IFS report shows the high earners tend to be those from more privileged backgrounds.
