Reply to HYP and Oxbridge: Are students taught differently?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]Cambridge i[/b]s the only school that MIT allows the transfers of letter grades from. My friends that did the exchange absolutely loved Cambridge and some went back for post-graduate studies. My roommate still lives there and is married and a British citizen now.[/quote]

Cambridge is an easier admit for Americans.[/quote]

[b]Not for STEM.[/b]

Also, Cambridge still requires 5 5s on APs.

But these all AP and test score requirements are pretty low for the UK.  A low floor, indeed.  My kid's high school didn't offer APs, which is pretty typical for privates now, and about a third of the class sits for APs anyway to maybe get credit or placement - in a "can't hurt" kind of way - and most end up with 5-9 5s. (The whole AP thing is a bit of a racket, right? It's only in back half of senior year that you know if any of these scores are useful or not.)

[/quote]
Yes, definitely for STEM; if you take into account how HYPS does account for major (without admitting it), STEM at Cambridge (though a very difficult admit, to be sure) is a far easier admit than a STEM kid at Stanford…

[b]Look at it this way: 1/13 Computer Science applicants at Cambridge are admitted (8%). What do you think the admissions rate is for CS at HYPSM? Is it even 2%? Natural sciences? Please. 1/4 applicants at Cambridge are admitted.
[/b]
What’s worse is that the curriculum at Cambridge is set in stone. An American CS whiz will learn nothing the entire first year, taking the equivalent of remedial courses (for them). The philosophy is everyone in the same boat from the start and all will be good eventually. It is a very European — and non- American — attitude.[/quote]

There are no restrictions in the US on who can apply to Harvard. There are plenty of restrictions in the UK on who can apply to Ox or Cambs. The school has to give permission and its normally a very small handful of candidates each year. So its a self selecting group already of highly qualified students. Your numbers are meaningless when you don't have this information. [/quote]

+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.  [b]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.  [/quote][/b]

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.[b] 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.[/b]

The other reason to take the Oxbridge number with a pinch of salt is that there is a lot of [b]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.[/b]

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 [b]brutal entrance exams.[/b] 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!

[/quote]

+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.[/quote]

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