Academic condemns 'torturous' university admissions

The university admissions process is "needlessly torturous", said Professor Mary Beard.?Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Mary Beard, the Cambridge University classics professor, said the admissions system employed in Britain was “more difficult and stressful than it should be”.

She also condemned the “shameless self-marketing” candidates committed on their application forms, suggesting many personal statements were copied from the internet.

In further comments, the academic rejected criticism of the notoriously tough Oxbridge admissions process, saying that common attacks on the system by politicians of all parties were misguided.

The comments were made after the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service proposed a sweeping overhaul of the current system.

They are planning to allow students to apply for places after receiving their results for the first time in a move that would lead to A-levels being brought forward and candidates choosing courses over the summer.

Writing for the BBC News website on Sunday, Prof Beard said that the changes would involve “more upheavals than you can imagine” but insisted it could take the “unnecessary heat out of the whole process”.

“The whole business of university applications in this country, for any university, is needlessly tortuous,” she said.

“The end result might be OK - happily many kids get where they want to go.

“But the route they have to take is more difficult and stressful than it should be.

“It relies on ridiculously minute distinctions between exam grades, it demands shameless self-marketing from the students on their application forms, and it operates according to a timetable that any outside observer would say was plain bonkers.”

Prof Beard, classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement and presenter of the recent documentary series Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town, said many universities now relied on students’ A-level grades and their personal statement – instead of an interview – to select candidates.

But she insisted: “Today's statements are much less concerned with good works, and are often uncomfortably corporate in style - weaving together clever quotations from Shakespeare and Aristotle with carefully constructed personal anecdotes, to create an implausibly perfect impression.

“They're so professional that they have to be put through "plagiarism detection" software - which apparently many fail.”

Currently, students are supposed to apply to Oxbridge by October – around a year before courses start – and to other universities in January. Candidates are then given provisional offers based on the proviso that they gain predicted exam grades the following summer.

Those who fail to score high enough in A-levels and other qualifications are eligible for “clearing” – the system that matches students to spare places.

But writing on BBC online, Prof Beard said: “More than anything, it is the bizarre timetable that makes the application process so preoccupying.

“When we say in January or February that someone ‘got in’ to their chosen university, we don't actually mean that. We mean that they will have got in if they achieve the grades demanded by the university in their summer exam, which even if all goes well, drags out the nail biting for a good six months.”

She added: “If it doesn't go well and they don't get the grades, they enter a whole new round of applications in August.

“This is a frenetic process, with applicants tracking down the remaining unfilled places by email and phone - then being given maybe a few hours to accept a place for a course they haven't really explored at a university they know little about.”