All in a day's work
Barry Reilly, Lecturer in Economics at SOC, tells us about his role as Admissions Tutor, which he took on last October, and explains the clearing process.
"Normally students apply to UCAS between October and December so we would be processing applications from October onwards right up to March. May is more or less the deadline, when the season closes. Then students have to make a decision about whether they are going to put Sussex down as their firm institution (first place) or as their insured (second place). By the end of June we get an indication of how many students have put us down as firm, and how many have put us down as insured. So we get an idea of what the likely outcome will be. Then everything depends upon how the students do in their exams and whether or not they meet our entry requirements, which we usually only find out a few days before the 'A' Level results come out.
So from 14 August onwards it is a very busy time, especially if we've had to go into clearing, which has happened in the last couple of years. This year we had about a third of our intakes from clearing. That doesn't necessarily mean that the students we get are of a poorer quality than those that had put us down as firm or insurance. We tend to be very selective so the type of student that we get from clearing tend to be of a good quality. For instance this year, the students we've been getting in Economics are those who have been turned down by their first choice because they didn't get 26 points or 24 points, but we've taken them on when they have, say, 22 points. So we're in quite a strong position in theory because there are good students out there, and if we can make a pitch for them then we are likely to do quite well. In fact sometimes the clearing quality can be much better than the general quality.
There are targets we have to reach: in this particular School we had a target of 230, but we were short by about 40 students. So we had to make a decision about which of the subjects were significantly deficient. This can vary from year to year. Some years you wouldn't expect certain subjects to do as badly as they've done and sometimes they out-perform our expectations.
If we get students who have put us down as firm but didn't make our standard entry requirements then we have to look closely. You have to make a decision about how low you want to go on a standard entry. Generally in this School we have a requirement of between 20 and 24 points, which would be BBC to BCC. But it really depends upon the nature of our demands. The good thing about the job I do is that much of the leg work is actually done by the administrative staff - Elizabeth Stewart and her team. They're the people in the front line. They have the difficult task of processing all the applications and dealing with students. They do an exceptional job under very difficult circumstances and make my life much easier."