Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you are about late medieval poetry. Instead, it has decreed that wannabe grads must now answer three dour questions. This move is designed to help those from disadvantaged backgrounds, who do not, in the eyes of a Ucas spokesperson, have access to teachers and family members able to help: and who could argue with that?
Well, I think it’s not only a shame, but another sign of the creeping hand of cold and normalising bureaucracy. You could see it in the arrival of mark schemes for essays when I was in sixth form: one minute, we were scribbling essays that could bring in anything you wanted; the next, we had to ensure we put in historical context and critical quotes, even if they had no direct relevance, just to make sure we hit the spot. Technology and progress do this to everything: take something free-ranging, and whack on a straitjacket.
Writing a personal statement should prepare students for the major thing that they’re supposed to be doing: writing essays
Even now, more than 20 years later, I’m thinking about my A-level texts. Virgil, Homer, Cicero and so forth on the Classics side, and on the English – Hamlet! We got to read actual Hamlet, closely, for almost a whole year! It makes me remember how much I loved them, and how much I wanted to study them and their ilk more deeply, and how much I wanted to convey that to anyone reading the statement.
Sure, I showed off in my posturings – I remember being particularly, shall we say, excessive about Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling – but that’s the point, isn’t it? Literature students with dreamy, romantic leanings tend to be swoony and superabundant in our vocabulary (at least before life whacks us on the head with a copy of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English). That very swooniness tends to be a marker, not of pretension, but of a lifelong interest in the subject, and thus a pretty good sign that you’re going to take a course seriously.
Answering Ucas’ proposed first question, ‘Why do you want to study this course or subject?‘, doesn’t leave much room for flair or imagination, and will no doubt lead to thousands of identikit answers. The second, ‘How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?’ seems only to be useful if you’ve decided to switch from, say, Spanish and French to Physics. Otherwise? Well, people tend to take French A-Level if they want to study French, don’t they? The final one, ‘What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences helpful?’, with its weird imprecision, fills me with horror, much like those On job applications: the less said about ‘Describe a situation in which you’ve been a leader’, the better.
These are the kinds of questions that ChatGPT can answer with competence. Indeed, I asked it to do one for me, and out sputtered the usual blarney about analytical, communication and research skills. And the thing about ChatGPT is that everyone can use it: it’s no way to parse the difference between a striving student from a council estate and a coaster from a castle. And I wonder, is it not the tiniest bit patronising to suggest that disadvantaged students need their hands held in a way that luckier ones don’t? Would not this also suggest that the courses need to be made more ‘accessible’ too?
It almost goes without saying that university admissions should be challenging. Writing a personal statement should prepare students for the major thing that they’re supposed to be doing: writing essays. In the earlier parts of the 20th century, many an Oxbridge college was brimming with dons from humble backgrounds, who’d won scholarships and glittering prizes not by having things broken down and spoon-fed, but by beating the chattering classes at their own game.
There must be ways of helping a wider range of students gain access to universities, without lowering the bar. I’m sure that university admissions officers are more than capable of seeing through the average student’s bluff. But will they be able to see through the reams of AI-generated guff that will surely follow?
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