Your tutors will report your academic performance as part of your UCAS reference, including your predicted grades. This is also where some contextual information about you can be included. If you're taking linear qualifications, teachers will report your performance via your UCAS reference.
Oxford does not require you to complete any extra forms. However, for most courses, applicants are asked to take a test as part of the application. Most tests are held at schools or colleges before an interview.
Applicants must be registered well in advance for tests by their assessment centre. At Oxford, candidates for the graduate entry medicine course A and biomedical sciences BC98 also require this test.
Ensure you note the correct date for taking this test. Oxford requires applicants to take written tests before an interview in most other subjects.
Please note that separate registration is required in many cases. Cambridge requires applicants to take pre-interview tests for around half of its courses. For other subjects, Cambridge requires a written test to be taken while at the university for the interview if interviewed.
You will not need to register for at-interview assessments. Both universities require some applicants to send samples of written work as part of their application. Both will expect this work at different times, so double check the deadline when you apply to ensure you don't miss it. Contextual data, or contextualisation, allow your circumstances to be considered and is intended to give a fair platform for applicants from differing backgrounds.
While your academic performance is still the key factor, contextualisation allows the university to assess how your school performs, your socio-economic background and more. You can also provide this information as part of your personal statement, or the teacher's academic reference.
Both Cambridge and Oxford consider school performance and your location to help place your educational achievement into context when assessing applications. Your academic record may also be considered in the context of the normal performance of your school.
If you're applying to Cambridge, your teachers can submit an Extenuating Circumstances form directly to the university, providing information relating to your circumstances. Oxford encourages teachers to include details of any special circumstances or other relevant information in the main UCAS application. At Oxford, where applications are around six per place, around half of all applicants are shortlisted for interview.
For the most competitive degrees, the applicants who most closely meet the selection criteria may have multiple interviews. The purpose and structure of interviews are very similar at both universities. Churchill College is a low-rise modernist stack on the edge of the city centre, a series of interlocking brick cubes. It does better on state-school intake than Cambridge as a whole. This is partly because of its reputation for science, which attracts more state school pupils. In its prospectus , the college is described as having a "friendly, unpretentious social atmosphere".
It is certainly not as physically daunting as some of the grand and ancient buildings in the city centre. But even here, the surroundings speak of wealth and intimacy with power; the sketches on the walls are by Winston Churchill, the floor is teak and the room is panelled with another glossy tropical hardwood.
The phrase "a good school" comes up repeatedly in the tutors' discussions. It is used most frequently about private and grammar schools, but also some comprehensive schools, and has a double meaning.
It is a school that knows what Cambridge requires, where the school reference is delivered in the terms the university is looking for — the key phrases are ones that emphasise superlative performance compared with their age group: "He [or she] is best in … he is top of …" But when a candidate comes from "a good school" they are also cut less slack.
The Sutton Trust , the charity that aims to promote social mobility through education, blames the unequal outcomes between state and private candidates at university level on the poor exam performance of some schools. That failure at school level becomes painfully apparent in the case of one of the Churchill candidates. She has had "unimaginable teaching difficulties", the tutors hear.
She has taken her A-levels at a school that has had a spectacularly high turnover of teachers. Peering at his laptop when her name is announced, Nick Cutler, an admissions tutor at Churchill, says there are "multiple flags".
The flags are used to indicate factors such as poverty, or a school that performs very poorly at GCSE. There are six categories in all — including whether an applicant has spent time in care.
There is evidence that a strong candidate from a bad school is likely to perform well when they come to Cambridge.
But the academics are concerned that in this case, the school has been so turbulent that she simply lacks essential knowledge. Her examination and interview marks are low. The rapid pace of Cambridge would "kill her", one of the academics says. Another agrees: "I would really like to give her a place, but for her own sanity, she's much better going to one of the other redbrick, Russell Group universities, and just taking her time.
Partington says: "If we gave her a chance she would do what everybody else would do, and think: 'I'll probably be all right' and she will probably be wrong.
There is a despairing consensus around the table that the university cannot repair the gaps in this candidate's knowledge. A damning line from the school's reference — which lays bare its inability to teach the candidate — is read aloud by a tutor who raises outstretched hands in exasperation.
The candidate's file goes back into the trolley with a clang. Another candidate from a comprehensive school has four contextual data flags by her name. There is a note too about "teaching difficulties" — a physics teacher who left during the sixth form and a stand-in for chemistry.
This is an easier case — her interview scores are high, an eight and a seven out of One of the academics reviews her "flags": "She's got low socio-economic, low-performing GCSE, low Oxbridge — she's nearly got the full set. There is another girl from a comprehensive school who got an eight at interview, but one academic exclaims: "Blooming heck, her GCSE score was terrible.
Partington decides to make an offer but to set the hurdle high because of the doubts. The tutors are divided about this — there is a feeling she has already been stretched thin in a "school that's not great". But they decide this will not be an entrance requirement.
She just needs a little more fluency in maths to cope at university. On the table are white china cups of tea and coffee, two barely touched water jugs and a single slightly blackened banana. The academics leaf through coloured spreadsheets with the candidates' names, their exam performance to date, predicted grades, interview scores, contextual flags and ranking — based on exam performance — compared with all of the university's applicants this year.
The pace is swift, despite the meeting lasting five hours. It is occasionally leavened with a touch of humour, or avuncular kindness. One of the academics, looking at a file photo, sighs: "Oh he's young — he looks like one of the Bash Street kids. Although a candidate's ethnicity is generally evident from his or her name and the photograph in their file, there is never any overt discussion of race. This seems surprising when both Oxford and Cambridge have been accused of being racially as well as socially exclusive.
Geoff Parks, director of admissions at Cambridge, says later: "Race doesn't come up in its own right. It's inseparable from socio-economic factors. Cambridge admits a proportion of BME [ethnic minority] students that is above the proportion of the teenage population, [but] with 'low-participation' neighbourhoods we feel we're not meeting a relatively low target.
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