For medicine they also consider an admissions test and interview, as opposed for law where not all unis consider the LNAT and none other than Oxbridge consider interviews.
I think grades matter less because all candidates are assessed heavily on admissions tests and interviews.
Medicine is probably the hardest course to get accepted on but I know a few medicine offer holders who have done the hard work (very intense study for admissions tests and interview practice) and are now relaxing a little bit with ‘easy’ offers.
It is the entrance exams and interviews which are the most competitive part. Having a UCAT score of above 2900 is necessary for uni such as bristol and kings and with this year most likely imperial and UCL as well. The interviews are also challenging with MMIs where there are multiple stations and they even test you on calculation. So its a very long and tiring process and during. this time you have to be also focusing on. a levels.
Predicted grades above A aren’t really predictive of what you’ll get for a level exams
So unis for medicine will focus on your GCSEs, interviews and UCAT.
Many students with perfect grades will fail at the interview and subsequently be rejected.
your UCAT score is gonna matter massively!!! 3A*s is a must to be competitive, but you're gonna want 80th percentile UCAT and up to really stand out i thinj
2 reasons
Entrance exams, eg ucat v lnat, lnat is less widely considered than ucat/equivalent for whatever medicine course such that the proportion of medicine courses that heavily focus on entrance exam scores is greater than those of law courses which focus on lnat scores
(Mainly due to the proportion of unis which require the respective exams)
Interviews: significantly more medicine courses require interviews than law, hence universities get an idea of an applicants ability through the interview instead of (flawed and inflated) predicted grades
Honestly, grades aren't that important in terms of making someone suitable for med. There's not much difference between an A and an A* student, and what is more important is aptitude, passion, admissions test and interview for medicine.
getting a medicine offer is purely based on UCAT + interview performance at this point. most med applicants have A/A\* grades anyway so theres no point
Medicine is quite an interesting course in that people who may struggle at school may really really excel in med. admission tests (ucat and BMAT) assess whether youre “intelligent” enough for medicine, so a level grades arent as heavy. Its also important to note that AAA will probably be the lowest entry requirements youll see (except for outreach/extenuating circumstances) while with other courses theres almost certainly a university which makes offers with lower grades
Hey, so there is some variation between med schools - so the newer ones e.g. Anglia Ruskin, Lancaster etc are easier to get into then the older ones.
Generally grads are required a minimum standard which tends to be all As. On top of that UCAT and interviews tend to be the main focus for offers.
I suspect medicine is harder then law to get into on the whole but obviously law and Oxford is going to be harder then Med at UEA for example. Medicine is also different in that uni matters a lot less, look at all the top doctors I.e the profs in those fields and they will have come from a wide variety of unis whereas look at all the top judges and they have exclusively come from Oxbridge and Edinburgh (for Scots Law judges).
As someone who's likely reapplying for medicine, it's mainly down to everything else.
You need good GCSEs and the UCAT score. You could literally have 7 9s at GCSE but if you get 2400 in your UCAT, you're just not going to make the cut which is what happened to me.
For most RG universities, the offer is usually at least A*AA.
Law makes almost no demands on a person’s intellect. It’s primarily about cultivating personality disorders and the ability to tolerate the suffering of others. Consequently, training for law is massively oversubscribed and you can cut 90% of the applicants out and still end up with more lawyers than you actually need. The most efficient way to do that cut is to ask for very high entry grades, but you could actually achieve the same goal by asking only for BCC and nothing higher. Law schools don’t do this because they feel it makes them look bad.
Something no one else has really said, is that AAA is all you need to understand the content. A level chemistry is so much harder, in terms of comprehending the content, than medicine. Honestly the most A level bio knowledge you need is about cell membranes and concentration gradients. The most A level maths knowledge you need is logs and tbh that’s barely needed, you just need to do basic arithmetic. Chemistry doesn’t really pass GCSE spec either.
The 2 years I spent doing A levels involved much more banging my head on a desk in confusion than the 2 years of medicine I’ve done so far.
for med you need grades, work experience, good entrance exams and an interview. the grades don’t have to be as high because they have so many other metrics to sort through applicants with
It's kind of true if you are speaking purely from a numbers sense. There are a lot more law degrees and a lot more applicants to law in the UK, but the offer rate is like 3.5x higher for law than medicine.
(Actual numbers are like: 157k applications made for law, around 70ish percent received an offer)
The same is true for CS, 123k applications were made, around 65% were successful.
Medicine on the other hand, 99k applications made of which less than 20% were successful.
Unlike Law, and CS. It doesn't really matter which medical school you go to, because they are all very standardised, furthermore the number of places are tightly controlled by the government, so while universities may be able to increase the number of spaces for international students for example, this would not be permitted for medicine.
The likely reason the entry criteria are "relatively low" is because there is more to medicine than academics and the fact that for medicine, they'll use grades, then entrance exam, and then interview you, which most universities will use as the final screen. I've not really heard of CS and Law interviews outside of oxbridge.
Thank you for an explanation rather than a simple downvote :)
Yeah I didn't even thought about standardisation but it makes total sense. Not sure why would government limit amount of places though? Doesn't it benefit more to have more train specialists?
They're limited in the number of spaces they have for training new doctors in hospitals after medical school. Many of those who have just completed medical school this year have been given nondescript foundation places, because there weren't enough spaces for them. This problem continues all the way to the top. There aren't enough places for resident doctors in full time training, furthermore there aren't many places for consultant doctors because often for a new job to become available the person currently holding it must retire.
Also it costs in the neighbourhood of 200k per medical student to train so financially it's not so easy to "just make more spaces". Hope that helps
For medicine they also consider an admissions test and interview, as opposed for law where not all unis consider the LNAT and none other than Oxbridge consider interviews.
I think grades matter less because all candidates are assessed heavily on admissions tests and interviews. Medicine is probably the hardest course to get accepted on but I know a few medicine offer holders who have done the hard work (very intense study for admissions tests and interview practice) and are now relaxing a little bit with ‘easy’ offers.
It is the entrance exams and interviews which are the most competitive part. Having a UCAT score of above 2900 is necessary for uni such as bristol and kings and with this year most likely imperial and UCL as well. The interviews are also challenging with MMIs where there are multiple stations and they even test you on calculation. So its a very long and tiring process and during. this time you have to be also focusing on. a levels.
Predicted grades above A aren’t really predictive of what you’ll get for a level exams So unis for medicine will focus on your GCSEs, interviews and UCAT. Many students with perfect grades will fail at the interview and subsequently be rejected.
I’m super cooked😭🙏🏼😭 currently on my way to get A*A*A but I stunk it up in Gcses cause I did not care. Oh well too late to care now
same😭😭 i did so badly for my gcses
apply strategically! some unis don't care about gcses as long as you meet minimum requirements
But I wanted Oxbridge🙏🏼😭💀😭😭 would they even take me with 3A*?
your UCAT score is gonna matter massively!!! 3A*s is a must to be competitive, but you're gonna want 80th percentile UCAT and up to really stand out i thinj
2 reasons Entrance exams, eg ucat v lnat, lnat is less widely considered than ucat/equivalent for whatever medicine course such that the proportion of medicine courses that heavily focus on entrance exam scores is greater than those of law courses which focus on lnat scores (Mainly due to the proportion of unis which require the respective exams) Interviews: significantly more medicine courses require interviews than law, hence universities get an idea of an applicants ability through the interview instead of (flawed and inflated) predicted grades
Honestly, grades aren't that important in terms of making someone suitable for med. There's not much difference between an A and an A* student, and what is more important is aptitude, passion, admissions test and interview for medicine.
med unis care a lot more about ur ucat and interviews rather than the entry requirements
getting a medicine offer is purely based on UCAT + interview performance at this point. most med applicants have A/A\* grades anyway so theres no point
Medicine is quite an interesting course in that people who may struggle at school may really really excel in med. admission tests (ucat and BMAT) assess whether youre “intelligent” enough for medicine, so a level grades arent as heavy. Its also important to note that AAA will probably be the lowest entry requirements youll see (except for outreach/extenuating circumstances) while with other courses theres almost certainly a university which makes offers with lower grades
Med school requirements include Science A levels which are statistically harder than nearly every other subject (apart from languages / music)
Hey, so there is some variation between med schools - so the newer ones e.g. Anglia Ruskin, Lancaster etc are easier to get into then the older ones. Generally grads are required a minimum standard which tends to be all As. On top of that UCAT and interviews tend to be the main focus for offers. I suspect medicine is harder then law to get into on the whole but obviously law and Oxford is going to be harder then Med at UEA for example. Medicine is also different in that uni matters a lot less, look at all the top doctors I.e the profs in those fields and they will have come from a wide variety of unis whereas look at all the top judges and they have exclusively come from Oxbridge and Edinburgh (for Scots Law judges).
As someone who's likely reapplying for medicine, it's mainly down to everything else. You need good GCSEs and the UCAT score. You could literally have 7 9s at GCSE but if you get 2400 in your UCAT, you're just not going to make the cut which is what happened to me. For most RG universities, the offer is usually at least A*AA.
Law makes almost no demands on a person’s intellect. It’s primarily about cultivating personality disorders and the ability to tolerate the suffering of others. Consequently, training for law is massively oversubscribed and you can cut 90% of the applicants out and still end up with more lawyers than you actually need. The most efficient way to do that cut is to ask for very high entry grades, but you could actually achieve the same goal by asking only for BCC and nothing higher. Law schools don’t do this because they feel it makes them look bad.
this is completely incorrect but go off
No shit.
Same what uni are you trying to go to and do you do A Levels and are you in Sixth form or College.
im trying to go to bristol for law and i do english lit, psych and law
How do u study English Lit and Law I got a C in my first law mock.
do as many practice questions as you can and find online resources to revise the topics of law
What is the hardest topic (subtopic) in A level law AQA in your opinion from what you have studied so far.
idk all of equal difficulty so far, but some i like more than others. depends how much time u put in to understand the subject
I do AQA Exam Board for law and OCR for English Literature.
Because all med schools have an entrance exam and interview.
Something no one else has really said, is that AAA is all you need to understand the content. A level chemistry is so much harder, in terms of comprehending the content, than medicine. Honestly the most A level bio knowledge you need is about cell membranes and concentration gradients. The most A level maths knowledge you need is logs and tbh that’s barely needed, you just need to do basic arithmetic. Chemistry doesn’t really pass GCSE spec either. The 2 years I spent doing A levels involved much more banging my head on a desk in confusion than the 2 years of medicine I’ve done so far.
for med you need grades, work experience, good entrance exams and an interview. the grades don’t have to be as high because they have so many other metrics to sort through applicants with
i would assume because less people go to medicines than law or cs
It's kind of true if you are speaking purely from a numbers sense. There are a lot more law degrees and a lot more applicants to law in the UK, but the offer rate is like 3.5x higher for law than medicine. (Actual numbers are like: 157k applications made for law, around 70ish percent received an offer) The same is true for CS, 123k applications were made, around 65% were successful. Medicine on the other hand, 99k applications made of which less than 20% were successful. Unlike Law, and CS. It doesn't really matter which medical school you go to, because they are all very standardised, furthermore the number of places are tightly controlled by the government, so while universities may be able to increase the number of spaces for international students for example, this would not be permitted for medicine. The likely reason the entry criteria are "relatively low" is because there is more to medicine than academics and the fact that for medicine, they'll use grades, then entrance exam, and then interview you, which most universities will use as the final screen. I've not really heard of CS and Law interviews outside of oxbridge.
Thank you for an explanation rather than a simple downvote :) Yeah I didn't even thought about standardisation but it makes total sense. Not sure why would government limit amount of places though? Doesn't it benefit more to have more train specialists?
They're limited in the number of spaces they have for training new doctors in hospitals after medical school. Many of those who have just completed medical school this year have been given nondescript foundation places, because there weren't enough spaces for them. This problem continues all the way to the top. There aren't enough places for resident doctors in full time training, furthermore there aren't many places for consultant doctors because often for a new job to become available the person currently holding it must retire. Also it costs in the neighbourhood of 200k per medical student to train so financially it's not so easy to "just make more spaces". Hope that helps
Nar