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PART Issues and Perspectives ofHigher Education

In the United Kingdom there is no uniform statutory provisions regarding university entrance examinations. Individual institutions lay down their own entry requirements and criteria. However, in general, they do not administer their own entrance examinations. In selecting their entrants, they usually depend on the results of external examinations for secondary school students.

University applicants are required to pass with certain grades or above the examinations for the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and the General Certificate of Education (GCE) (Advanced Level and / or Advanced Supplementary) in the subjects specified by each faculty or department of the university they wish to enter. Students take a GCSE examination at the age of 16 when they complete compulsory education and a GCE examination at the age of 18 when they complete upper secondary education.

University applicants submit their applications through the Universities Central Council on Admissions (UCCA), which is responsible for dealing with centralized procedures for admissions to universities. Each applicant can apply to five universities. The application form has a space for the report of the secondary school principal, in which each principal is requested to report applicants' academic achievement, personalities, and future prospects, and so on. The UCCA sends a copy of the application form to all the universities of the applicants' choice. In selecting entrants, individual universities consider the results of the above examinations for each applicant, as well as the report of the school principal. Some faculties and departments have interviews with the applicants. The names of successful applicants are reported to the UCCA. The universities of Oxford and Cambridge give their own entrance examinations, apart from the GCE and GCSE examinations.

The UCCA informs each applicant of the decision of each university as to whether it will admit him or her, upon receiving the answer of each candidate. The UCCA informs each university whether or not he or she has accepted the offer of the university. Those candidates who have not received any offer from any of the five universities they applied to will be informed by the UCCA of the names of other universities having vacant places. The UCCA was created in 1961 as a common agency serving universities. It has been pointed out that the services of the UCCA have prevented university candidates from making an early and limited choice of universities and have also increased the students' chance of entering a university.

Universities give special consideration to "mature applicants" who are 21 years old or over, by taking account of their working experiences and mitigating for them minimum entry requirements in terms of the number of passes in GCE A-level subjects or the level of grades obtained.