HYP and Oxbridge: Are students taught differently?
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Anonymous
And US students have to waste 1/4 of their courses in Gen Ed / distribution requirements. |
Anonymous
No- they just call it year 13. They call kindergarten year 1. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
No. Oxford is a tougher admit according to Crimson Education: 'According to these acceptance numbers, Cambridge appears to be the easier to get accepted. However, you still need to be at the top of your class and prove that you have mastered the subject in which you wish to get a degree. If you come from the US, your test scores need to be incredible.May 23, 2023" |
Anonymous
| you don't have to do anything "according to Crimson Education". these schools publish their stats by major. I wish US schools did. |
Anonymous
Wrong. In the US kids start K aged 5 (sometimes close to 6) and in England they ALL start school aged 4, if the kid turns 4 in January, that is when they start school, January. They are all reading by the end of the year, having started at 4. Its a vastly superior education from start to finish. |
Anonymous
There are no school restrictions, anywhere, on Oxbridge apps, other than an applicant meeting the minimum requirements. And the percentage of UK kids with the requisite A-levels is very high. Anyhow, love to see a cite about these mysterious “gatekeeper” restrictions you are referring to instead of this gobbledygook. Anyhow, 1/3 of Oxbridge apps aren’t even from the UK. To say the least, it is far easier for a UK kid to get into Oxbridge (or even a Chinese, Indian, or American kid) than it is for any of those groups to get into Harvard. By such an order of magnitude in terms of raw numbers (4-20x easier, in fact), than even a 2-3x adjustment in your favor gets you nowhere where. It is not even close. But go ahead, believe Oxbridge is as selective as HYPS. Or even Emory. The admissions stats are there to see, at Oxford and Cambridge, for every course of study. Numbers are stubborn things. |
Anonymous
Those distribution requirements (because we had lots of leeway in the kinds of courses that checked the box) significantly enhanced and enriched my HYP undergraduate experience. It's only a "waste" for those who lack the curiosity or love of learning outside their area(s) of focus. |
Anonymous
Nobody is saying it is a straight comparison. But if you don’t think Harvard is a far easier admit, the extent of your strangely-professed Harvard “affiliation,” on an anonymous message board no less, is that you have been to Harvard Square. As for the “self-selecting” argument, top UK students are far more likely to apply to Oxbridge than a top student in America is to apply to HYPS as an SCEA not even close. Why? SCEA schools are so hard to get in, a top student is better off applying ED to, say, Dartmouth. Almost every top UK student applies to either Oxford or Cambridge as one of their 5 UCAS choices. In other words, Harvard is, by definition, more self-selecting than is Oxford. |
Anonymous
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There's a trade-off between breadth and depth, obviously. Here's an interesting article comparing Yale and Oxford:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2010/04/23/whats-better-oxfords-depth-or-yales-breadth/ |
Anonymous
That's 14 years old, sarcastic and from a student newspaper |
Anonymous
[b I have been to Harvard Square. Walked daily through it for three years. Did reasonably well with Rhodes and Marshall competitions but made only regionals.. .applied direct to Oxford. Did not get in. Got into Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UCLA and Michigan law schools. Went to Harvard Law. DD is at Oxford now. Oxford is a tougher admit than HYP (unless URM or first generation) and I can explain why starstically but only if someone is really listening. Happy to answer any serious questions. |
Anonymous
+1. This! There's more restrictions about applying to Oxbridge, limiting the size of the applicant pool. For example, you can't apply to Cambridge and Oxford in the same year. Have to pick ONE. Contrast that to Americans who want to apply to all the ivies + several others just because. Oxbridge admissions are much more of a meritocracy than the holistic American system. You have to meet minimum standards for the A-levels to even be considered, and the fact that you're all-star field hockey player isn't going to give you an edge. There are hard cutoffs that don't exist in the American admissions system, and admissions are conditional on maintaining a high GPA and A-level performance. You simply can't compare the admission rates between the schools and conclude that one is harder or easier to get into than the other. |
Anonymous
THIS!. This Quora expert nails it, but you have to READ it to understand. This Oxford grad's analysis is spot on EXCEPT he fails to factor in that Americans get in at a rate than the British, etc. - the figure is given at 7.2% to 8% for Americans. So HALF of the 16 percent he citesl.. But please read, especially point 2 to understand. Yes, this is dated by about 2 1/2 years but his points are valid: Is it harder to get into Oxford or Cambridge than Ivy League schools? It’s… different. I’ve spent a lot of time crunching the numbers in other Quora answers, so I’ll just do the summary version here: Statistically, an applicant’s odds of getting into Oxford or Cambridge are somewhere around 16%. That is higher than even the least selective Ivies (Cornell - around 10.6% ), and a long way off the most selective one (Harvard - around 4.5%). However those numbers alone are deceiving. You can only apply to either Oxford or Cambridge, so your competition drops by half. By contrast, you could theoretically apply to all eight Ivies. So your odds of not getting into Oxbridge are static at around 84%. The odds of not getting into any Ivy if you applied to all eight are around (0.927 ^ 8) = 54.5%* (mathematically speaking - I know it doesn’t work like that in real life). Comparing those figures, Oxbridge looks a lot harder. The other reason to take the Oxbridge number with a pinch of salt is that there is a lot of self-selection. In the UK you can apply to a maximum of five universities. So only serious Oxbridge candidates apply to Oxbridge. In the US it is unlimited, so a lot of people will “have a go” and apply to Ivy Schools even though they have no realistic chance. That is a big factor behind the really low yields at Ivy League schools. But the really key point is that the nature of the applications are very different. Oxbridge applications are absolutely all-in on academic achievement with brutal entrance exams. Ivy League schools tend to go for ‘holistic’ assessment. Every year there are a few head-scratchers who get into Harvard because they are seen as leaders of the future despite having very mediocre academic stats. In Britain every so often the press goes nuts when a Brit gets into Harvard after being rejected by Oxford / Cambridge. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. They are very different applications, and you shouldn’t expect that a person who excels at one would necessarily excel at the other. * The average admission rate across the entire Ivy League (weighted by numbers of admissions) is 7.328%. Penn and Cornell obviously drag the average up because they are bigger schools. Yes, I am sorry to say that I did take the time to work that out on a spreadsheet. Source: 2023 Ivy League admissions results are in! |
Anonymous
+++++++1 |