That's 14 years old, sarcastic and from a student newspaper |
[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. |
+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. |
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! |
+++++++1 |
\ it is a shame you wasted so much time on an ill informed post. If you don't have the backing of your school admin in the UK you cannot, literally cannot apply to ox or cambs. You are clearly a total moron |
Williams employs the Oxford tutorial system. Swarthmore Honors Seminars also similar. |
SAT subject tests were discontinued. |
Sure, if you have so little love of learning that you only learn what is assigned as class work. |
How do US Students get into Oxbridge science programs?
The website says they expect 5 AP scores, focuses on or near the major, including Calculus BC and Physics C (both parts) scores. It's rare to take all of these and extremely rare to take them all in junior year, and also take more related APs like Bio and Chem and CS. Do US high school students take a gap year and apply to Oxbridge after senior year? |
Can't they tell from your accent? |
+1. This. Taking the Oxbridge entrance exams is a big barrier. Meanwhile anyone who wants to apply to a selective American school simply needs to take the SATs or ACT and click. |
I saw online that Cambridge officially requires an SAT of 1460-1500 depending on major. Requires.
No holistic or hook for that. |
Let me guess, you are foreign-born... Most people don't think that learning about areas outside computer science is a "waste." |
Much better than wasting over 50% of your courses in an underchallenging curriculum |