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Hello. So I have been sent to talk to you about the admissions process. I'm Dr Kirsty
Hughes. I'm a lecturer here in public law, particularly human rights and privacy, but
I'm also the admissions tutor at Clare College and what I'm going to do today is I'm going
to go through a sort of overview of the admissions process and explain in particular the role
that the admissions tutor has in that process. I'm going to do this quite quickly because
we don't have very much time and I want to leave as much time as possible for you to
ask questions, because that's usually the more useful part of the session. So the admissions
process obviously starts in the autumn and you have to get your UCAS form in by 15th
October. Shortly after that you will be asked to fill in what we call the supplementary
questionnaire. The supplementary questionnaire isn't anything that you need to worry about.
It's an opportunity for you to say a little bit more about why you want to apply for Cambridge
and primarily it's a form in which we ask those of you that are doing A levels to provide
details of your AS module scores. That needs to be submitted quite quickly after 15th October.
You have about a week to turn that around. It's not onerous in any way but you just do
need to be aware that you will need to fill in the supplementary questionnaire.
What happens then is that your applications will go to the admissions tutor of whichever
college you have chosen to apply to or, if you've applied for a sort of open place and
you haven't specified a college, then the university admissions office will send your
application to a particular college. At that point when the applications come in they're
all treated the same regardless of whether you applied to that particular college or
whether it was an open application and what happens is the admissions tutor examines the
application and decides whether or not to call you for interview. And we usually interview
about 90 to 95 percent of all applicants. We'll usually interview, if you're doing A
levels, somebody who we think looks on track to achieve at least our standard offer and
our standard offer is an A star and two As. One indication of that will be if you have
one AS score which is 90 percent or above and the other AS scores are 80 percent or
above, but many applicants will have AS module scores of far higher than that.
So from your perspective what happens then is if you're called to interview you'll receive
a letter probably towards the start to middle of November and the interviews will be held
early December. You then come to Cambridge for the interview in December and you may
have one or two interviews, usually with law fellows in that particular college, and I
can explain a little bit about the way we do the interviews in my own college, which
is Clare College, and I would imagine other colleges are broadly similar although you
should check on their websites as well. So what we do when I interview is we give the
applicant a little scenario and a number of different variations on that scenario, perhaps
with some rules. You don't need to know anything about this particular area of law. In fact,
if you have done law before we'll usually make sure that we do an area of law which
you haven't covered, so you don't need to know anything about this particular issue.
What we're looking for is to see how you can reason with the material that you're given,
how you can understand and apply the rules that we provide you with, and it'll be similar
to the sort of things that you've probably been doing this morning.
Then usually what happens is you'll also be asked to do a law test and the law test that
we do at Clare is a similar sort of principle. Again, you're not required to have any specific
legal knowledge, you'll be given all of the material that you need and you'll be asked
to analyse text and various scenarios. What happens next is that the interviewers at the
end of the interview period, they get together and they meet the admissions tutor and put
forward the list of candidates that they would like to make offers to. The admissions tutor
then has to look at the offers across all of the subjects that they're responsible for
and decide how many offers can be made for law. From your perspective, what happens next
is in January you will receive a letter and one of three things can happen at this stage.
Either you'll be made an offer, which will be fantastic news; alternatively, they may
decide at that point that they can no longer continue with your application so unfortunately
at that stage your application will come to an end.
Or the third thing which can happen is that you could end up in what we call the "winter
pool", and the winter pool is a mechanism by which other colleges can consider your
application. So if for example, you apply to Clare and we thought that you were very
good but unfortunately you weren't top of our list, but we thought other colleges may
well still be interested in you, we will put you into the winter pool and you can be considered
by the other colleges at that stage. If that happens it will take slightly longer, a few
more weeks, but you may be made an offer by another college. You may also not be made
an offer at that stage, in which case your application will then come to a close. What
happens after that is that you have to accept the offer and then obviously you have to meet
the terms of the offer, and the terms of the offer are usually an A star and two As for
A level, or 40 and 776 in the Highers for those that are taking the IB. But we also
have applicants applying from all sorts of other countries. We also have people who are
doing Scottish Highers, we have people doing Irish qualifications and we can work out an
appropriate qualification for each of those examination systems as well.
In the summer when you get your results, hopefully you will have major offer, in which case you
will come to Cambridge in the October, or if you applied for deferred entry, the following
year. If you haven't made your offer then in August when all of the A level results
come out and the admissions tutor will then have access to all of the results at IB which
come earlier and then A levels, then we get together and the admissions tutor looks at
whether it's possible to still allow you to come to Cambridge having not made your off
and whether that is possible depends on a number of things. It depends on how much you've
missed your offer by, whether there's any reasons for why you've missed your offer and
it also depends on whether we have any places left, because each college makes slightly
more offers than we actually have places because we know that we lose people at that stage.
So the admissions tutor will take those things into account and they will then decide whether
or not to allow you to come to Cambridge anyway. So that's the timescale of the admissions
process.
One or two other things. So I mentioned deferred entry; if you want to apply for deferred entry,
that's absolutely fine, we get applicants applying for deferred entry every year. The
only sort of crucial thing is that you must make that clear at the time at which you make
your application. It's not usually possible to defer your entry after the offer's already
been made because at that point we'll have already decided our numbers for that year.
But if you say that from the outset, then that's usually fine to apply for deferred
entry. The other thing to bear in mind is that if you are applying with A levels and
you have not got AS module marks, then the offer set might be slightly higher to reflect
the fact that we don't have as much information about your academic background, in which case
that would probably be two A stars and one A. But I'm going to open it up to questions
now, so any questions?