You could always accept a US offer and defer a year. See what happens with Cambridge. Since you would be telling US school you are doing a gap year, you would not be holding on to a seat etc. Then you make your decision in June.
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This is the most worrying indication to me. British students grow up with self-study: typically you’ll get several weeks at home before the important exams at 16 (GCSE) and 18 (A-level) where you study (“revise”) on your own. At Cambridge the terms are so short that you expect to spend 2-3 weeks in each of the Christmas and Easter vacations catching up on everything you didn’t complete and preparing for the next term (you’ll even get a reading list before starting that you can’t ignore). For the final exams in the summer term of my third year I literally spent 6 weeks studying on my own 8 hours per day before exams (I had to get a first to get my PhD place). And at least in my day it was not at all a collaborative experience, I’m not sure how much that has changed.
But if you can do well enough to get your five 5s, then you may be underestimating your ability to study.
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I’m not sure how this would work without a plan to do something for a year (that your US college will want to know about before granting permission to defer). And you can’t finalize that gap year plan if there’s a strong chance you will be heading to the UK.
Best options are either to a) plan to go to the UK anyway using your UCAS insurance offer if you don’t get the grades for Cambridge (that’s an automatic process once the exam results are known) or b) accept a US offer as backup, pay the deposit, register for housing etc and hope you don’t lose too much money by withdrawing in July.
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Would the self-study and exam requirements being discussed for Cambridge apply equally to St Andrews? Curious because my daughter was accepted to St Andrews and may also find this to be a difficult adjustment.
yeah, that’s part of my hesitance to accept the offer (especially without visiting/doing more research). for what it’s worth, i’ve been unable to access my adhd meds on and off for the past two years so i am hoping once i can get them consistently that my habits will improve.
Equally, I don’t know about that. Cambridge has a reputation, shall we say.
But the basic idea of needing to be confident self-studying for single big high stakes exams translates across the UK including Scotland. My S24 is confident enough for St Andrews, and has not had a problem with things like the ACT or AP exams.
This is a little random, but I found this particular source really helpful in better visualizing academic life there:
This is from a CMC student who studied abroad at St Andrews, but I just found it a particularly illuminating and digestible.
Along the same lines, here is a (now pretty dated) blog post from a William & Mary joint degree student:
I think this has more material less relevant to people not in that program, but I think the explanation of how grades in sub-honors versus honors matter is helpful.
My two cents is that alone is a big difference between St Andrews and Cambridge–you get two years to figure out if you can make this work for you.
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Thank you, that’s helpful! I’ll read through these posts.
Oh man, tell me about it. Our system is FUBAR right now. I actually think this could be a critical deciding point for you, then. Are they at least as easy to access in Cambridge UK as they are in Cambridge MA? If so, leave that option on the table. If not…buy the sweatshirt for bragging rights and move on? 
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That blog post is helpful, I think the following similarities and differences stood out:
- St Andrews exams are 2 hours, Cambridge ones are 3 hours
- The exam essays are very similar - you have ~40-45 mins to write a coherent, well structured essay - as I mentioned, a strong one will be up to 6-8 pages of single spaced A4/letter paper, so 2000-3000 words (though note my spouse got a first which at the time was only the top 5% of students). And you have to do 3 or 4 of those back to back in a single handwritten exam, which British students have been practicing for years.
- Reading is more important than lectures is true for arts subjects, but not so much for STEM - I don’t recall ever visiting the library, instead everything was about the weekly or bi-weekly problem sheets (and you did need good lecture notes since at the time nothing was online). However, in arts and social sciences you will almost certainly be reading hundreds of pages a week.
- Tutorials (“supervisions” in Cambridge terminology) are important for figuring out things you are stuck on as well as discussing your work, with a tutor (professor, though at Cambridge often a grad student for higher level courses if your college doesn’t have a fellow with the relevant expertise) and 1-3 other students. It would be unusual to be able to complete all the problems on a Cambridge problem sheet, sometimes even the tutor is puzzled since they don’t get provided with solutions and have to work them out on their own. St Andrews seems to also have larger group “example classes” which AFAIK don’t exist at Cambridge, probably this is a way to keep costs down compared to smaller groups. Not sure if lecturers at St Andrews give tutors the worked solutions. It would be unusual to seek out extra tutoring outside of this setup (unlike the tutoring centers which are common in the US colleges).
That’s the same in Cambridge, in the sense that you only write your final year degree class on your resume, not the interim ones (unless you want to show off you got a “double first” i.e. a first in Part 1 and a first in Part 2), so you just need to not fail. But degree class stays with you forever in the UK, if you work there you will still have to put it on your resume 30 years later. Some Cambridge colleges do offer scholarships for students who get a first in Part 1 (very modest amounts of money like a few hundred pounds, but priority for rooms in college may be a bigger deal).
On the other hand, in either place, your transfer options back to the US could be limited if your initial grades were poor. And the UK really doesn’t do transfers anyway, so this is not something that you’d expect to get much help with.
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Its tricky, you can get ADHD meds in the UK easily enough with a prescription (at least the generic ones), but finding a doctor willing to write one can be hard - British kids will usually need a referral since primary care docs may not want to prescribe them (and qualified child psychologists are scarce). But it is possible that a UK primary care doc may be willing to write a prescription based on information from your US doctor - hard to know. Or you can take the drugs with you from the US if you can accumulate a sufficient supply for a whole term (and take a copy of the prescription to show at the airport if asked).
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Our system is FUBAR right now.
and i could go on a whole rant about insurances and generics vs brands (your pharmacies are lying to you they are NOT the same!!!) but this is not the thread for that, lol.
Based on what you said, it sounds like the UK structure would be a nightmare for you - and figuring it out would have to be done before Cambridge because there’s just no time to see how you do with the new required skills while on the proper medd v.without when a full term has been packed into 8 weeks.
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Although note that Cambridge exams are only at the end of the year in June. Unlike say Oxford with prelims in January. You can flounder in supervisions the first term but none of that counts for grades and then you have 5 weeks over Christmas to try and get back on track. The key thing is to expect that you won’t get much time off (I would typically sleep for a week due to exhaustion then spend 3 of the remaining 4 weeks revising).
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yeah, they meant what they said, haha. oh well. i think my predicteds were all 5s at least
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the description in the articles above are pretty accurate…
I attended St As back in the day, and I know a few kids there recently. It’s not as bad as Oxbridge, but I was in the department library most days 9.30 - lunch, and afternoons reading, reading, reading… and preparing notes for essays and discussions in small tutorials. This was for a subject in Faculty of Arts. My STEM friends were similarly in the library or the lab…Pre exam time was even more intense.
I also had friends who did none of this except when assignments were due, crushed it in a couple of days of panic, and repeat for exams. They all did less well FYI…!
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True. I’m always thinking people should consider a gap year anyway.
Ssa
My son was a ‘19 entrant, ‘23 grad from St Andrews… joint honours. While they may have an admission team recruiting in the US, it is definitely the department making the ultimate decision as to who to admit. St Andrews is rigorous… very rigorous. All of the AP courses in the world just scratch the surface of the depth of study there. There is a reason St Andrews doesn’t accept AP credit. My son is now in grad school at a very prestigious US school and the program director (12 in the program) told him they chose him specifically because of St Andrews and the depth of knowledge he has as a result of going there. He wrote a 12,000 word dissertation as an undergraduate.
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Rejected from Cambridge, as expected, so am not at all upset. A bit mystified, however, that the college I applied to isn’t even offering feedback? Is this something anyone else knows about? In years past I’ve heard that feedback was always offered.
also re: adhd talk earlier in the thread:
found out two weeks ago that i have severe adhd and have essentially been walking through life in an overstimulated panic, hence why i would study 24/7 and still not be able to finish my work, was unable to keep a job, lost all my friends, hate school, am constantly exhausted etc
i started medication and suddenly the whole world has slowed down, i can pay attention in class, and complete tasks with no difficulty at all.
so, yeah, i’m feeling slightly cheated, because if life were this easy for all of high school, my gpa would be so unbelievably high that i’d appear on good morning america. now, all i have to show for 4 years of (literal) blood sweat and tears are two university offers i might not even achieve, and burnout.
i’d been saying for ages, it’s physically draining for me to even go to class for 1 hour a day, let alone 6, and yet everyone denied there might be something wrong with me because i was able to keep up a pretty convincing facade and a 3.96gpa.
i can’t stop thinking about how, had i been medicated even for first semester senior year, i might have gotten a cambridge offer. but anyway, that’s all speculation, since it’s over and i didn’t get one.
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