(Combination is state primary, independent secondary on a scholarship, and now Oxbridge, where I'm working on degree number 2 or 3 (depending on whether you count my BA and MSci as separate)).
The problem with Oxbridge admissions is that you're aiming to separate the best few from a very large group of people who are all, more or less, good enough to do the course: ideally, this would be totally blind to the background of the people being sifted, but it's naive at best to think that schools aren't going to, whilst an Oxbridge education is perceived as being of greater value than going elsewhere, work out how to play whatever system of admission is being used - be it interview technique, exam preparation, or special training in hopping backwards around Trinity Great Court whilst singing the Marseillaise.
You can try to compensate for this - Target Schools, for instance - but I'm not sure this makes the system "fairer" as much as "differently unfair", as there's still some cutoff where your school is 'too good' to be a Target School but not able to coach you the way that the most successful Oxbridge-targetting schools can. Someone, somewhere, is going to get the sharp end of the stick. Even if you set some qualifications standard, and then turn over the admissions to a lottery among qualified candidates, there's still some unfairness - it's easier to get the qualifications at a school with better resources.
The best you can do, I think, is to try and reflect the social balance of applicants - so, given that (at the moment) state schools are comparatively underrepresented (it appears - I'd need to check the stats), there should probably be some bias applied that way. My gut feeling is that this'll just tip the scales towards a small coterie of state schools with experience of preparing candidates for interview, though - so, really, no different from the current situation...
(I'll now read the other comments, which I've avoided so far - sorry if I've reused anyone else's arguments inadvertently.)
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Date: 2004-01-22 01:33 pm (UTC)The problem with Oxbridge admissions is that you're aiming to separate the best few from a very large group of people who are all, more or less, good enough to do the course: ideally, this would be totally blind to the background of the people being sifted, but it's naive at best to think that schools aren't going to, whilst an Oxbridge education is perceived as being of greater value than going elsewhere, work out how to play whatever system of admission is being used - be it interview technique, exam preparation, or special training in hopping backwards around Trinity Great Court whilst singing the Marseillaise.
You can try to compensate for this - Target Schools, for instance - but I'm not sure this makes the system "fairer" as much as "differently unfair", as there's still some cutoff where your school is 'too good' to be a Target School but not able to coach you the way that the most successful Oxbridge-targetting schools can. Someone, somewhere, is going to get the sharp end of the stick. Even if you set some qualifications standard, and then turn over the admissions to a lottery among qualified candidates, there's still some unfairness - it's easier to get the qualifications at a school with better resources.
The best you can do, I think, is to try and reflect the social balance of applicants - so, given that (at the moment) state schools are comparatively underrepresented (it appears - I'd need to check the stats), there should probably be some bias applied that way. My gut feeling is that this'll just tip the scales towards a small coterie of state schools with experience of preparing candidates for interview, though - so, really, no different from the current situation...
(I'll now read the other comments, which I've avoided so far - sorry if I've reused anyone else's arguments inadvertently.)