It’s a very long time since I had any direct contact with UCAS forms or the whole process of undergraduate admissions. At that time, a vital part of the knowledge handed down by more experienced colleagues was how to recognise examples of what one might call Lake Wobegon School of Reference-Writing: Where all the students are above average, and one of the best I have ever taught, and uniquely well suited to the degree programme in question. We could have filled our admissions quotas many times over with such applicants, which would be fine for the bottom line, but a slightly depressing teaching prospect, especially thinking of the better students we might miss because their teachers were more honest and/or less practised in talking up their charges. Oddly enough, such boosterism was wholly associated with fee-paying schools.*
As the admissions process has become more and more professionalised, I would imagine that this sort of thing has become less effective, and less worth the effort. Instead, as a story in the Grauniad this week revealed, we get a new sort of game-playing: exaggerated predicted grades. Of course this isn’t exactly new – one always had a sense that fee-paying schools were, on average, optimistic about the academic potential of some of their students. What has changed is the degree of competition for students and the not unrelated expansion of unconditional offers; whereas once an applicant would actually have to get their predicted grades, or at least something close, so boosterism just gave them a chance, now it might get them the place regardless of actual performance. Oh, and also the fact that the guidance openly states that the predicted grades aren’t intended as actual predicted grades, but a means “to facilitate application to a more selective university”.
That is…lying. Up to this point, I had vaguely assumed that grade predictions were more or less honest in intent, even if they might be based on an optimistic view of what a given student might achieve on a good day with a following wind and a bit of luck. How naive even a middle-aged cynic can be… Of course other schools have probably been sensible enough not to write down the stuff that should remain understood, but it seems unlikely that this is an isolated practice.
This isn’t quite as infuriating as the present government’s incompetence and corruption, but it is pretty infuriating – bringing back memories of the number of times I got harangued by private school headmasters for Bristol’s supposed bias against their students. Actually they probably think such tactics are wholly justified as a weapon against the social justice agenda of universities… It’s all about protecting the bottom line; why would parents pay tens of thousands of pounds per year in school fees, if not partly in expectation of benefitting from expertise in gaming the university admissions system? If they can’t get young Bertie** into a decent place, what’s the point?
This isn’t necessarily great for Bertie, if you think about a degree not in terms of the perceived prestige of the university but the actual, you know, education stuff; he’ll probably do okay, but might have been much happier and more engaged on a different course somewhere else. Meanwhile, that’s a place that could have gone to someone better suited to the course, whose teachers thought the point of predicting grades was to predict grades. Britain in microcosm; ordinary people work hard and follow the rules on the assumption that the system is fair, and if they fail it’s because they just weren’t good enough, while the privileged few get to play by different rules, buy their way through life, and constantly fail upwards…
*To be fair, there was also the phenomenon of teachers who apparently despised their students and wanted to destroy their prospects, judging them vastly inferior to some mythical generation of genuine talent in the distant past, or possibly just to themselves. But such references did go out of their way to emphasise the quality of the school and its high standards, by way of implying that even their more feeble specimens must be more intelligent and talented than the best products of other establishments.
**I am using Bertie as a generic name partly as the reference to the P.G. Wodehouse story ‘Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg’ and partly after a late, much lamented cat. No aspersions are intended on any actual Berties I have taught over the years.
Sphinx 
‘Oddly enough, such boosterism was wholly associated with fee-paying schools’ do you have any data to back this up?
Purely anecdotal; those were the sorts of schools whose references I was advised by colleagues to take with a pinch or more of salt, and that was my experience in reading a lot of references.
I suppose there’s a difficult disparity here. The ridiculous references make sense, on the other hand the only data (at least that I’m aware of – 2011, 2016 reports) shows independent schools are more likely to predict accurate grades.
Yes, Sutton Trust research shows that state schools on average consistently under-predict students. Private schools likely to get it right – if they choose to predict accurately… To be fair, the school in question has now announced that it’s going to stop doing this in future, honest.
Then there are (tiny violin time) those who send their kids private because they genuinely believe they’ll be happier in a more academic environment, and whose kids get boffo predictions which they then meet by working their socks off, only to carry the faint suspicion that they’re One Of Those Posh Kids Who Are Quite Advantaged Enough Already for years afterward. It isn’t much of an advantage if it doesn’t actually advantage you, as I might have said back when I was an unemployed Cambridge graduate.
Stupid system. Would not use again.
Exactly my own experience, and of course it’s one reason why no one has ever talked about discriminating *against* those whose parents made such choices – even if any attempt at levelling the playing field for everyone else was regularly attacked in those terms.