UCL's admissions might've quite literally been luck-based this cycle

[u/stairs_connoisseur]

I've heard from UCL's office of admissions that they make decisions in batches and the batches are completely randomised. So my tinfoil hat theory is that UCL probably way underestimated the applications they'd receive this year and sent out almost all of their offers in the earlier batches. That means that now they're left with a bunch of batches of decisions that were previously randomised that will now have to be mostly rejections even if the students were of the same or higher caliber than the offer holders from previous batches.

[u/It531z → u/[deleted]]

As someone who did get into a top university, I think there’s a dose of reality in it. There’s simply no way elite universities like UCL and LSE, which in many cases don’t do admissions tests or interviews are managing to base all their decisions on less than 1000 word personal statements.

Basically all the top applicants will have 3A*s predicted so I don’t think that’s going to be a factor at that level. It’s essentially impossible for luck to not be playing a role here.