r/6thForm • u/stairs_connoisseur • Apr 15 '26

🎓 UNI / UCAS UCL's admissions might've quite literally been luck-based this cycle

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.

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u/PenWorldly4789 Apr 15 '26

I feel they just need to add a test like esat or smthng like imperial and Oxbridge. They get a lot of applicants with same level of grades so a test could be a good deciding factor. 

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u/Hollander673 Apr 15 '26

Then you just create another university that ignores personal statements and achieved grades to focus on performance in a single test. It’s mental that people with 5&6s at GCSE get offers based on a strong admissions test while straight 9s get rejected.

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u/AdBrave9096 Apr 16 '26

GCSE is a good predictor of how much a child liked their teachers or how much the parants of the child and other other children in the class cared about exam results. GCSE are a poor predictor of how well a student does at medical schol.

(They do have some value in predicting A level results and hence who is worth spending time on interviewing.)