Since the due date is October 15, if I took 3 SAT 2s in the October testing date, would they accept that? I tried to find more information on this but they werent clear if they accept these tests after the due date (I will receive my scores soon after October 15).
Does Trinity college in cambridge accept Sat 2s?
Yes, it’s fine to apply before you have the results - it just means that, like British students, any offer of a place would be conditional on getting certain scores.
But I see from the Trinity website they want 5 APs and aren’t interested in SATs:
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/admissions/ug/apply/overseas-qualifications
So do you have to get 5 5’s on APs before you apply to Cambridge?
Not before, but to be admitted. In the UK it is typical to apply with some exams, and ‘predictions’ for the rest, and if they are offered a place, it is ‘conditional’ on achieving the ‘predicted’ scores. So, if you apply with (say) 2 APs, with 3 to take senior year, if you get an offer it will be ‘conditional’ on your getting your ‘predicted’ results on those APs, so you won’t know for certain that you have your place until AP results come out in July.
Hi! I would just like to add, just in case you still need some more comments, that I think you have a good chance when you have a good AP on your sleeve. Regarding the interview, well I think every interview for study abroad is quite hard not just in Cambridge alone. About the prestige and all, Cambridge is at the top league I believe when you’re truly into that “prestige” stuff best to push through with Cambridge 
There is no guarantee of admission to Cambridge or Oxford. Both universities are very selective for international students. The acceptance rate for internationals is 8% for Cambridge. However, this varies by country if your from an eu country the acceptance rate could be as high as 18%.Americans unfortunately lower than 10% currently standing at 9.4%. Although that is an increase that’s higher than the previous year when the success rate was 7.8%.
In order to maximize your chances of admission make sure you exceed the entry requirements and have done some interesting extracurriculars related to your course so you have something to write about in your personal statement/ talk about in interview.
Students with AAA* on their A levels have a 52% success rate, students with AAA have a 26% success rate. That would be the equivalent of 40-42 on IB having a 52% success rate and 38-39 for a 26% success rate. Also the success rate varies from 15% for engineering to as high as 47.7 % for classics.
All the Cambridge admissions statistics are in this link:
http://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/files/publications/undergrad_admissions_statistics_2014_cycle.pdf
Hope this helps
When you apply, you shouldn’t expect your chances to be the same as a regular applicant. Since you are American, you don’t have to worry about nationality when applying to Ivies and etc. However, to the UK, you are international and
requirements are much higher for internationals. You have to be much higher than the average in academics for UK similar to how internationals have to be much more involved in activities, score higher on tests for US.
@Ali1302 But 40-42 IB having 52% success rate would have to be reduced by half due to americans having half the acceptance rate of UK. Which would drove 40-42 IB to 26%. So, if you look it at from this perspective. To have a good chance, > 40, you would need an academic record that would be excellent for any US univ (even Ivy accept people with B) but to get an IB of above 42, you would need not only straight A, but almost straight A+ for a good shot at Ox/ Cam.
@boomboom123, where do you get the idea that
? That is simply not true. The standard offer is the standard offer, regardless of nationality.
Moreover, your extrapolation is not helpful for prospective applicants, as it relies on a false premise: that there is a causal relationship between the number of As and the likelihood of an offer:
.
The flaw in that is that for almost all candidates, the admissions tutors do not know how many A* the student has / will have when making an admissions offer, as virtually all UK students apply with predictions, not achieved marks.
Every UK applicant will have predictions of at least AAA (for humanities subjects) or AA*A (for science subjects), as those are the minimum requirements for entry. If the candidate has those predictions, and the other pieces are right (PS, LoR, and any required submitted work, subject specific test), they will get an interview. Once a candidate gets to interview the playing field is more or less level until they get to tie breakers, when all aspects of the student’s application are revisted.
To tell people that they need an IB prediction of 42+ to have a ‘good shot’ at Oxbridge is wrong and unhelpful.
@collegemom3717 The minimum requirements doesn’t really make one competitive for Cambridge as most students would have AAA* predicted grades. These predictions are accurate most of the time and Cambridge would look at your AS grades and UMS to see that you have around 95% average on your tests or at least 90% mean on all of your Junior year tests. Also note this 52% success rate is the mean admit rate, students get rejected with AAA* regularly on subjects such as medicine, law, mathematics and engineering. Achieving 3 A* or a 42+ IB would place you among the top 2-3% of students in the UK that’s why the success rate is so high.
The reason there are significant amounts of students with AAA or AAA in Cambridge is because once the AAA predicted students get there conditional offers they simply have to meet the minimum to get in. At this point there is no obligation to get AAA* as opposed to the minimum AAA or AAA that you need for your offer. Some students with conditional offers may fall short of the minimum AAA for humanities subjects for instance English and get AAA yet are still accepted because they would only fall short a few marks which the university overlooks. This is why you get a percentage admitted with AAA on their A levels. I suspect it would be similar with IBs.
In my opinion, collegemom offers just about the best overall advice for oxbridge on this site.
Our experience is that, after some initial filtering that does not set very strict limits on GPA or test results, the adm tutors look at what the individual applicants wrote with great attention to their passion for their discipline. My daughter, who is AMerican but applied from a French lycee, did not have stellar grades at the time of her application, but very carefully wrote her UCAS applic. She was asked to write an extra paper, then invited for interview, and was pooled then promptly given a very stringent conditional offer. To meet it, she would have to score (on her BAC) in about the 98th percentile. That means that the grade expectations are high, but the most important is the final results, but less so for the initial filtering.
Did you get an interview? How’s it going?
@alcibiade Did your daughter apply to Oxford or Cambridge? They are both very different in the way they select students. Oxford puts more emphasis on GCSE grades as well as predicted grades, while Cambridge would look at your AS results/UMS to see that you have the 95% mean test score, they also look at GCSEs but give them less weight. The reason American applicants have a low acceptance rate to Oxbridge is because they do not meet the academic standards of the institutions, they assume Oxbridge admit student like US universities. Oxbridge are just as selective as ivies don’t let the 20% admit rate fool you. UCAS only allows students to apply to a maximum of 5 universities and you can’t apply to both Oxford and Cambridge. This reduces the applicant pool and discourages a lot of potential applicants or those interested in applying. If these restrictions didn’t exist Oxbridge would have a <10% admit rate easily. Imagine if the same restrictions applied to the US where you could only apply to 5 universities or only one IVY ,the admit rates at ivies would increase dramatically.
my turn! @alcibiade’s daughter is at Cambridge, mine is at Oxford, and both of us have worked with many prospective students to help them understand the process at the respective universities.
Originally you were asserting that the requirements were higher for American students, which is not correct. Your post above:
has some truth to it: many students look at the requirement for 3 or 5 APs and think that looks pretty easy. They do not realize the depth of knowledge that European students (who often take fewer or a narrower range of subjects) bring to the table, nor the difference that having a genuine and sustained interest in their subject makes. Even some very high flyers (my favorite example is the student who bombed the Oxford interview but has recently graduated summa from Yale) don’t make it through the subject-specific tests/written work submissions, never mind the interviews.
That is another place where your insistence that an IB score of 42+ is necessary falls short: At this point I know the secondary school standings of rather a lot of current Oxbridge students- and many of them got offers where their peers with better marks/predictions did not- because of how they did in subject specific testing and/or interview.
The interview serves a number of purposes, but one of the big ones is to see how the applicant will do in a tutorial format, which is not a learning style that suits everybody. Other high achievers get turned down because the tutors don’t think that the student is suited to the actual course. Alcibiade’s daughter is an excellent example of an applicant whose genuine passion for the subject got her an offer based on good-enough but less than perfect marks.
And that is my problem with you asserting to the CC world at large that without an IB of 42 you don’t have a reasonable shot at Oxbridge: it is factually wrong, and could put off applicants who would be really well suited.
@collegemom3717 Oxford and Cambridge have high academic standards and the majority of applicants meet those standards(minimum grades) yet are rejected. Most of the students I know who were admitted to Oxbridge had AAA* predicted grades and had a 95% UMS on all of their AS level tests. I’m not saying that you need to be absolutely perfect academically but I can’t see how that could hurt your chances either. Yes there are some students that slack off once they receive their AAA or AA*A or even until recently AAA offers and do not meet their predictions yet still score high enough to get an offer.
I knew a student that applied for English at Oxford and got an AAA offer yet achieved an AAB but they still admitted him since he made a great impression in addition to the fact that he was only 1 UMS point off the mark. Now English isn’t an easy course to get into it has a 21% admit rate so yes test scores aren’t everything I’m willing to agree with you there but a student with a+42 IB score is going to have higher chances on average than someone with lower scores
I wanted to add a note on admissions from international high schools, based on my correspondence with a Cam admissions tutor. He emphasized that his team exerts great effort to understand foreign high school standards on their own terms, which they did better for systems they knew. The reason for lower admissions rate for overseas (as well as EU) students, he said, was that they were extra careful to ensure that they could cope with the particular academic rigor and culture at Cam. In addition, he mentioned that many foreign applicants did not understand the expectations for the initial cut, both in terms of grade minimums but more importantly, in demonstrated interest and concentrated focus in their chosen field.