11 Plus Exams Forum

Every student who has the academic potential will get to interview.

Oxford spend a long time interviewing in early December, that is why the Xmas term finishes so early so they can use the student rooms for interviewees.

Many students interview at more than one college to give them the greatest chance possible. DG

Not everyone who lives in a middle class area or sends their children to private school is from generations of wealth and privilege. Far from it. Some of us went to a comprehensive in a very dodgy area and then worked our way up to a nicer one. To penalise the children for the social mobility of the parents is questionable.
I suppose what I wonder about this is that they now think their interview process can draw this innate potential out, and previously they couldn’t spot it? If they now think they can spot this without affecting the quality of the outcome, well we’ll see I guess. The result will be that the private school/affluent postcode kids who might previously have been Oxbridge candidates will target the likes of Imperial/Durham/Warwick instead. As has been said many themes on this forum, Oxbridge isn’t the best place for everything. I do think its quite interesting that all of my friends who went to Oxbridge (some on access schemes from comprehensives to e.g. Hertford College Oxford) will now find their kids discriminated against.

If you want to hear about parents gone mad to game admissions, try the podcast Gangster Capitalism. Apart from the annoying ads, the first episode had me hooked.

fairyelephant wrote: To penalise the children for the social mobility of the parents is questionable.

What about all the children who are penalised in almost every possible way from the day that they are born due to the lack of social mobility of the parents? Could that be considered 'questionable'?

interesting post I see Loopy is still well ... "Loopy"

My daughter went to oxford after failing her eleven plus and going to a comp a nice middle class comp but still a comp there were 12 people interviewed at her college for E&M of which 3 got places she was the only non private school person (one of the other applicants had asked everyone). She had good GCSE's mostly a*'s and was predicted A*AA which she got. The other 2 students on her degree (that she got on with great both from top private schools) both got A*A*A* in their a levels and she was concerned she was a bit of a duffer, however academically in tutorials apart from being less confident she soon found she was equal indeed she felt she had a big advantage in that she was used to having to learn stuff herself and had been less spoon fed at her school and ended up getting a higher degree than either of the others in the end, so her view was that oxford was smart to not just go by academic achievement but to look at the context in which the academic achievement was reached. Certainly if i was an admission tutor and i had a applicant with a few a*'s (probably 9's now i guess) in GCSE's from a school that had an average achievement of 20% a-c at GCSE and a applicant for a top private school with all a*'s i would look favourably on the first applicant due to environment and therefore the individual focus and self determination that those results implied.

In fact she was told by her tutors that they do indeed look at final degree results correlated to gcse's and a-level results and that state school and particularly not selective state school students achieve better final degree scores than private and selective state school students with the same pre-university results and thus they feel justified in seeing these results in context.