Cambridge ignores UCAS personal statements
These kids obviously spent no time on their personal statements.
Rather than meeting this (admittedly still refreshing) statement of the bleeding obvious with praise The Times cried woefully: “All those hours that applicants have spent trying to distinguish themselves by doing Duke of Edinburgh awards, ploughing through Ulysses or helping out in the local care home might just as well have been spent watching South Park.”
Except they’re not. If you go to your interview and reveal that you spent the majority of your A-levels doing nothing constructive, I doubt you’ll get far.
The only reason that Cambridge can give personal statements the short shrift they deserve is because Cambridge, along with Oxford, are the only two institutions in the UK that interview practically all applicants (you have to be pretty spazzy not to get an interview in most subjects). This means that every other university is left taking punts on prospective students based largely on the 500 words of often plagiarised, unoriginal bollocks that makes up a personal statements.
Oh, and the personal references too. But, wait just one second: “Personal references from teachers are also treated with a huge pinch of salt. Now that students can ask to see their references, teachers have stopped saying anything interesting or controversial, Mr Parks suggests.”
Which bright spark thought that this was a good idea? An acquaintance of mine got into LSE on the strength of some references he had edited heavily himself. Situations like this are easily avoided when the references are hidden from the student – as they should be.
So what do universities base their offers on? Let’s see:
- Exam results that do not have the room to allow the brightest to shine and are (apparently) no harder than the The Sun crossword
- A personal statement that is often not written by the personality in question at all
- And teachers references that everyone should ignore because teachers can’t say what they actually think.
AQA, Edexcel and OCR, but especially UCAS, thank you all for making higher education that little bit worse.
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