One Idea

An initial draft of this post was about how to make rankings more meaningful, a piece of mathsy computer science, as you expect it from this blog. My motivation is personal: I'm involved in selecting CS undergraduate students. Some people might be curious how Oxford admissions work: it's certainly a favourite subject for UK politicians and news media. Therefore I decided to postpone my original plan and to write this post about Oxford admissions. I hope I'm not playing with too much fire and the blog will not suddenly become famous for the wrong reasons! The tenor in newspapers and political campaigns is that the Oxbridge admissions process is “opaque” and unfair. Here I am going to offer transparency and some comments on fairness. The views expressed here are my own, and may not necessarily coincide with the university's views. Oxford's goal is to admit the strongest applicants. One can disagree with this basic premise, but we try to admit those applicants who