The University Entrance Quagmire

 The University Entrance Quagmire

How does one negotiate this quagmire? There is so much muck thrown in there, of different ilk, that most parents struggle to traverse it.

In the days of a previous life when I taught Secondary school, the Careers Department would interview each child and try to help them through the maze. The end of the school year, with exams approaching, and teachers teaching less furiously, I would have time to spare. Especially as the A and O level exams finished early in the year. 

Students would come up to my table and talk to me. J was one of them. She was a lovely child in a group where most of the students were out to create as much disruption as they could. I asked her what she wanted to do after she left school. 

'I'm going to be a doctor,' she said without hesitation.

Mmm. I was trying to break it gently. 'Will you get the grades needed?' I asked, J was an average student, and she would get three or four O levels, but she would not get A and B grades. She had the kind of personality, which would make a great G P. Kind, considerate, caring. In my mind I wished her well. But -

She must have read my mind, I thought when she added. 

'I'll get a place at Barts. 

'My brother qualified from there. He is working in Canada now, but he'll come back to make sure I get a place.'

I left the job that year and a few years later I met some old students at the hair dresser's. So I asked about their year-group. J, apparently, was now two years into her medical course at Barts. And I thought this happened only in India!

Later I came across teachers in fee-paying schools who had graduated from Oxford or Cambridge, and easily got their charges into their old colleges. As for predicted grades, I tend to take them with a large pinch of salt. If the teachers like you, your predicted grades (they genuinely believe they are being impartial) tend to be good. If you are untidy, unruly and uncouth, you got damned. So, I'm glad Universities will now look at actual exam passes. 

No one doubts that the system is unfair and complicated. However, it is good to know that the marsh is being dragged and some of the muck cleared.