Here comes yet another blow to the rigour of Oxford’s entrance exams. Last December, they got rid of the in-person interview, replaced by less discerning Zoom interviews. And now the university has dropped lots of its subject-specific exams, to be replaced by more generic tests.
There will still be some tailoring to particular degrees. Humanities candidates will sit the Test of Academic Reasoning for Admissions (TARA), while maths and science applicants will take the Engineering and Science Admissions Test (ESAT) or the Test of Mathematics for University Admission (TMUA).
But those exams are still more generalised, less subject-specific than the old ones.
The aim is to help those who haven’t had the advantage of a brilliant school education – often, but not always, a private one – where you’re lucky enough to have had a deep grounding in your subject.
That’s laudable in subjects that don’t require deep grounding to proceed at top speed once you’re at university. But the truth of it is that if you’ve had a rigorous education from five till 18, then it’s near impossible for someone without that benefit to catch up in the brief three or four years of university.
By the time I got to Oxford to study classics in 1989, I’d done eight years of Latin and seven years of Greek. And that was with long school terms and long daily hours of tuition – compared to four years of a classics degree, for only 24 weeks a year, with only two hour-long tutorials a week.
I had been educated at a London prep school and at Westminster School. My classicist contemporaries at Magdalen College, Oxford, had been as well-educated at other private schools and at grammar schools and comprehensives. In those days, we all sat rigorous entrance exams and tough Oxford exams once we were there. That opportunity for all has nearly disappeared today, now that A-Level Greek has all but gone from comprehensives. A tragedy – and an extremely unfair one.
Oxford has admirably tried to close this gap, with Greek and Latin lessons for undergraduates without the languages, once they matriculate. But, even if they were taught for enough hours to narrow the gap, don’t forget that the undergraduates with the deep grounding are also studying at a top level while the others are catching up with the basics. The gap is bound to persist.
So the only way to paper over this massive gulf is to water down the entrance exams – and water down the exams once you get there. And that’s exactly what Oxford has done, increasingly offering classics-lite exams.
Poor Oxford! It’s not their fault. They’re under government pressure to increase access. But they can’t state the screamingly obvious – the answer isn’t to try to close the gap once you get to the grand old age of 18. The answer is to raise the standards of all schools to the levels of the best schools.
It’s striking that Oxford is keeping subject-specific tests for medicine and law – the University Clinical Aptitude Test and the Law National Aptitude Test.
That is tacitly acknowledging rigorous entrance exams are required for aspiring doctors and lawyers. A badly grounded doctor could butcher you on the operating table. A badly grounded classicist will only mess up his gerundives.
Mmmm… Maybe. But it will also mean Oxford’s overall standards slowly decline, as they are beginning to do. Last year, neither Oxford or Cambridge were in the top three British universities for the first time since the records, made by the Times, began 32 years ago.
Off the record, some Oxbridge dons will admit to this decline but most of them want to hold on to their jobs, understandably, and so stay quiet.
Off the record, some Oxbridge dons will admit standards are declining
Still, last month, a memo from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, revealed their policy of approaching several top private schools, including St Paul’s Girls, Eton and Winchester, to improve the ‘quality’ of applying pupils, worrying about ‘reverse discrimination’.
Trinity Hall’s ‘targeted recruitment strategy’ meant approaching around 50 independent schools to encourage applications in degrees including languages, music and classics.
Marcus Tomalin, Trinity Hall’s director of admissions, said:
The best students from such schools arrive at Cambridge with expertise and interests that align well with the intellectual demands.
To ignore or marginalise this pool of applicants would risk overlooking potential offer-holders who are not only exceptionally well-qualified but who have been encouraged to engage critically and independently with their subjects in a way that Cambridge has historically prized.
That is, of course, unfair on those who haven’t had the same good fortune of being well-grounded in those subjects. And Trinity Hall was roundly attacked for that unfairness.
But it’s no coincidence that the subjects referred to were languages, music and classics. All three depend on a huge well of knowledge – facts, declensions, conjugations, notes – that you need to learn before you can study them at a high level.
Real fairness demands a level playing field – that everyone applying to the best universities in the world should have had the same access to the best education up until the age of 18.
Real unfairness isn’t top universities demanding that their applicants have been equally well-taught. Real unfairness is a system where some schools provide that education – and others don’t.
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