A100 and A102 Medicine
Dear King’s College London,
I would like to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, regarding your A100 and A102 applications data for the most recent completed admissions cycle (applications submitted in October 2016 for the current 2017/2018 academic year) :-
1) How many students, in total, applied for the A102 course?
2) Wha was the average UKCAT score of all applicants for A102?
3) How many students, in total, were admitted for the A102 course?
4) For all applicants for A102, could you please provide a list of: all applicants, their UKCAT score, SJT band, degree classification (predicted and/or achieved, including postgraduate qualifications predicted/achieved), whether or not they were interviewed, including those that were successful? Or, as much of this data that can be allowed for.
5) How many applicants applied to A100 with a graduate degree? (predicted or achieved)
6) How many graduate applicants for A100 received an interview and offer, and what UKCAT score (including SJT bands) did they achieve?
Yours faithfully,
Joseph Bennett
Dear Mr Bennett,
We will treat your request for information as a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, received by the university on 18 October 2017. We will endeavour to respond to your request within the statutory 20 working day time frame.
Please note that the university has adopted the model publication scheme and also publishes FOI responses on our Disclosure Log.
Kind regards
Jade Roche
Information Compliance Officer
King’s College London
James Clerk Maxwell Building
London SE1 8WA
Dear Mr Bennett,
Please find attached our response to your information request.
Kind Regards
Jade Roche
Information Compliance Officer
King’s College London
57 Waterloo Road
London SE1 8WA
Dear Ms Roche,
Thank you for the timely response. I would just like to clarify one detail. The UKCAT scores given for this FOI request are lower than average. Is this because of internal scoring, rounding and anonymisation; or is it because the average scores were divided by 4 sub-sections rather than 3?
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Bennett
Dear Mr Bennett,
I put your question to the admissions department who provided me with the data. In response our admissions officer provided the below response which is based on his opinion and knowledge of the data produced.
Our UKCAT score reporting is usually based on the total figure (usually around 2550) , divided by the four parts to produce an overall average (usually around 650) .
Checking the average scores of our applicants over time does show a sudden dip in the most recent cycle.
It is my understanding that for the 2017 entry cycle, one of the sections was not scored or counted by UKCAT. However, the scores do not appear to have dropped by a quarter. A change in the way that the score was calculated is likely. I might speculate that to produce an overall score that was in line with sores from previous years, UKCAT supplemented the three scored parts of the test with an 'average' score. For example, adding 500 onto the scores of all test takers. However I do not have confirmation of the policies that were applied by UKCAT during this period.
Changes in methodology between years would not have affected the decisions of the admissions department, as the UKCAT is used to compare candidates within an application cycle, rather than as an absolute measure.
I hope this is of assistance to you
Kind Regards
Jade
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