A Is For Aberystwyth

‘IT is now an immutable law of nature, on a par with Newton’s laws of gravity, that one year’s exam results must always be better than the previous year’s.

Birds of a feather swot together

We can no more change that than Vanessa Feltz can pass through the eye of a needle.

Stick a few thousand monkeys in an exam room, put a paper in front of them about Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and most of them will come out with A-grades.

And so it is inevitable that every year will see more and more stories of pupils who have been rejected by university despite getting all A-grades in their A-levels.

This year’s cause celebre is Candice Clarke, who applied to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine but was turned down despite getting five As.

She may have been one of 19 students at Colchester county high school for girls to get five As and was by no means the only person with similar grades to be turned down.

But Candice lives on a council estate, both her parents are disabled and no-one in her family has been to university – making her prime material for the Guardian.

”I was angry,” she told the paper. ”I deserved to go there and worked really hard. Oxbridge should take more working class people from state schools. They should have a bigger range of people.”

But it wasn’t just Cambridge that turned down Candice – she was also rejected by Nottingham and Bristol before winning a place at Newcastle.

Trinity College also turned down David Lee Watkins, who had five A-grades at A-level and two extra at AS-level, and Esther Son, who had six A-grades to her name.

According to the Guardian, Tom Carver, of Colyton grammar school in Devon, did manage to get in, but had to get five A-grades and two B-grades to do it.

Next year, those grades will barely be enough to get him into his local technical college.

‘

Posted: 15th, August 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink