It’s easy to achieve top marks when you attend private school and are groomed for academic excellence from a young age. Oxbridge students overwhelmingly come from this background.
I think there’s a perception that most Oxbridge students are somehow sleepwalking into academic success. I can only speak from my experience as a Cambridge undergrad, but I will say that this perception hardly translates to reality: 8 week terms; no reading week and very small classes means term time at Cambridge can be very intense. I know people who went to high-flying private schools, but still struggle to keep up here, so I don’t think it’s necessarily “easy” regardless of one’s background. It’s definitely worse for state school students like myself, but the bottom line is that a lot of people here work hard, including those from extremely privileged backgrounds (and there are some people here ofc who don’t but even those people have seen their fair share of hard work at A-level/GCSE stage, for example).
I still don’t think that this means Oxbridge grads should have a leg up in the recruitment process tho as getting into Oxbridge in and of itself is a highly competitive process, so people shouldn’t be disadvantaged off the basis of not attending.
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