A-level results day will soon be upon us again. It is a day of mixed feelings, and not only for those who miss their grades. Many young people will be looking forward to going to the university of their dreams. But others know that even if they achieve the highest possible grades, they are going to have to settle for second-best, not having received an offer from their first-choice institution. The “what ifs” will plague some of them for life.

University admissions are never going to be perfect, nor can they ever be completely fair — there are simply too many bright young things competing for places at the best institutions. But if we really care about making the system as good as it can be, perhaps it is time for an overhaul. 

Change is already afoot, with the jettisoning of the personal statement, the box on the UCAS form where applicants talk about their Duke of Edinburgh awards, music grades, sporting prowess and “lifelong passion” for Dentistry or Mechanical Engineering. This move has been widely hailed as progress, since statements cause applicants anxiety and could very well have been written by their mum. (Astonishingly, it would seem that some have even been going to the lengths of hiring private tutors to write them.) A new format is coming in — three questions about applicants’ motivations, qualifications and extracurricular activities — though this sounds merely like a more structured version of the same thing.

Only in the most selective contexts were personal statements ever a really decisive factor in deciding between two competing applicants. More generally, personal statements never carried the weight applicants presumed them to, though they were useful in giving academics a sense of who was going to turn up. If ever I hear the words “Coquilles St-Jacques”, I am transported, Proust’s madeleine-like, to a particular moment, over twenty years ago, when I read a statement that opened with a beautifully evoked description of a family holiday in France. This sort of thing had no bearing on the outcome, but at least it reminded you that behind the application form there was a real human being.

Unfortunately for the candidates who lavished so much time and effort on crafting these miniature autobiographies, it seems they often weren’t even being read by the academics whose eye they sought to catch. In a recent letter to The Guardian, an anonymous course leader from a Russell Group university stated that he or she was never able to advise students on what to put on their statements, because “the only people who ever looked at those statements were administrators and bureaucrats, never academics or people actually involved in the programmes. I wonder how many students ever knew this”.

Interviews also seem to have fallen largely by the wayside. A young relative of mine was recently offered places at five Russell Group universities but did not receive a single invitation to interview. This surprised me, since for over two decades I had taught exclusively at universities that interviewed, but speaking to colleagues elsewhere revealed my experience to have been the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the Times Higher Education supplement reported that most universities had already stopped as long ago as 1998.

The motivations for interviewing in the two contexts I experienced were perhaps rather specific. At Oxford, interviewing candidates was (and continues to be) a necessary mechanism for choosing between numerous outstanding applicants who were equally well-qualified on paper. It was also part-and-parcel of a bespoke system where an individual college tutor would select the students with whom they would work intensively over three years in small groups or even one-to-one.

At the other university in town, the personal touch also mattered, but for different reasons. Interviewing at a post-92 was not so much about selection as PR: persuading applicants that even though the facilities might not compare with those elsewhere, there were personable academics who might be fun and interesting to learn from. For my subject, Music, hearing applicants perform was also clearly meaningful to them, and for many years this was a recruitment strategy that worked for everyone. The decision to end interviewing, a few years ago, was one of a number of institutional missteps that resulted in declining student numbers and ultimately course closure, to the distress of academics, students and alumni alike.

When admissions become centralised, when interviews are abandoned and personal statements potentially not even read by those doing the teaching, how are decisions  about which applicants to admit actually made? There are predicted grades, but the scope for error there is obvious, and there are teacher references, but those are susceptible either to hype or indifference. (It is not unknown for a teacher to be biased, either against an individual student or a particular type of university.) 

A patchier record in your weaker subjects should be neither here nor there

The only thing that is concrete, when one has no direct contact with an applicant, is the list of GCSEs. The thought of an admissions officer or, heaven forbid, some sort of digital tool merely scanning application forms for a string of straight A grades will be a chilling thought for the late developer and the non-generalist alike.  Some people are brilliant at Maths but hopeless at English, and you don’t need a flair for Chemistry to be an exceptional Historian. A patchier record in your weaker subjects should be neither here nor there when it comes to degree-level specialisation.  

Centralised admissions systems are symptomatic of a university sector that is becoming ever more relentlessly bureaucratised. But putting the decisions into the hands of non-specialist administrators who can’t realistically understand what makes a good candidate for every single course a university offers, or even reducing applicants to scores on a spreadsheet is not a system to be proud of. It is very difficult to spot potential when you remove human contact from the process. In an ideal world we would find ways to re-personalise the university admissions process. But if high numbers of applicants make this unrealistic, scrapping the current system altogether and allocating places only once applicants have results in hand is the only fair way to go.