Dear George Borne,
 
This is in reply to your enquiry received by the College on 21 December
and made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). I can confirm
that the College does hold some information related to your enquiry, but
it is exempt under section 40, personal data. Disclosure would require the
processing of personal data for reasons other than those for which it was
collected, and it is not possible to anonymise all the third party data
subjects’ identities if the information which you requested is disclosed.
Therefore, the information is exempt under section 40 of the FOI Act.
 
We hope the following information will be helpful to you:
 
HOW DO WE ASSESS APPLICATIONS?
 
At King's, we are looking for promise and potential. So although existing
and predicted grades form a central criterion for admission, as do
interview scores, we are careful to interpret grades and interview results
in light of your personal and educational background. We assess each
application individually. We are interested to learn about your existing
knowledge and skills, but we endeavour also to find out how you would deal
with the new materials and ideas you would encounter at Cambridge. All
candidates are considered strictly on the basis of their academic promise.
 
During the application process, we look at:
• your academic record, including GCSE and AS (or equivalent) grades and
marks and A level (or equivalent, e.g. IB) grades or predictions, this
record being considered in the context of the quality (but not type) of
schools/colleges at which it was achieved;
• your school/college reference;
• your personal statement;
• your admissions assessment (taken at interview)
• your performance at interview(s)
 
With this holistic view you can understand that it is not possible to
predict your chances of success based on predicted grades and/or interview
scores. Our advice is to apply if you look like you can achieve the
typical offer of A*A*A for Economics at the end of sixth form. There may
be subject-specific requirements as well, see your subject page at
[1]https://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/study/underg... for any such
requirements.
 
We read the whole of each application and take all parts of it into
account before deciding which students to invite for interview. As we only
invite students for interview who could potentially be made an offer, it
would be unusual to invite a student predicted less than our typical offer
for Economics that year. The typical offer has changed over the past four
years. For further information you might find this useful:
[2]http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk.... Please use
the interactive graph generator at the bottom of the page to generate the
reports you asked about.
 
We have no set quota for the number of applicants we invite for interview
– we invite all candidates who we could potentially make an offer to after
reading the paper application. In an average year, this is 70-80% of
applicants.
 
If you have further questions please ask me in the first instance. I
attach a leaflet outlining the College's FOI Act policies and procedures.
If, after following those procedures you are still not satisfied with the
way in which your request has been dealt with you may apply directly to
the Information Commissioner for a decision. Generally, the Commissioner
will not entertain your complaint unless you have exhausted any relevant
internal review procedures.
Yours sincerely
Peter Jones
Peter Jones, FOI officer, King's College, Cambridge
[King's College, Cambridge request email]

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