Centre Right
The complete restructuring and centralisation of Oxford’s admissions system, revealed today by The Oxford Student, should be welcomed by anyone involved in any stage of the process. The Oxford applications process has been shrouded in secrecy for too long, and while the Freedom of Information Act has brought an element of transparency to the process, the inability of faculties to ensure they were accepting the best candidates made the system completely inequitable.
Similarly, documents obtained by The Oxford Student show that some applicants were able, with colleges’ complicity, to subvert the process by informally requesting interviews. The University’s stated aim that an applicant’s choice of college should not affect their chances of acceptance is thus clearly impossible to ensure under the current system.
While the issuing of the Working Party report on centralised admissions has been postponed, the plans contained within it to streamline the process certainly appear to go a long way towards resolving the problem. By giving students the same scope for choosing a college but centralising admissions within the faculties, the plans will take away the elements of the admissions process that are so susceptible to conscious and subconscious manipulation.
For example, candidates will no longer be able to gain an unfair advantage by applying to a college where their school has a history of success. The Oxford Student believes these plans have been put on hold as a result of the government’s Post Qualification Application (PQA) proposals, a system that in principle is eminently sensible but which would be a logistical nightmare in practice. It is also very hard to see how the new legislation would benefit Oxford admissions in any way.
Therefore after extensive consultation which stretches back to 2002, and after the Admissions Secretaries for a number of subjects have recommended the new system, Oxford may be forced to completely restructure these reforms. Conditional acceptances create very few problems for Oxford colleges and PQA is another bureaucratic initiative that will lead to a university admissions system which is either rushed or which puts entry back several months.
Sir Michael Beloff’s speech at St Andrew’s last October may have carried entirely different sentiments to those being expressed here by The Oxford Student but his prose was unequivocal when he told the government to “take its tanks off Oxford’s lawns”. With regard to admissions processes, these are sentiments we can only echo.
28th Apr 2005