Top universities to launch own entrance exams

and BRITAIN’S leading universities are scrambling to introduce their own entrance exams in a move which threatens to undermine the authority of new “toughened up” A-levels.

This week was the first time that students received their results for the new Alevel courses, which were designed by Michael Gove, the former education secretary, as part of a drive to raise academic standards in schools. But several of the elite Russell Group universities have signalled that they can no longer rely on A-levels to select the brightest students and are instead bringing in a raft of new assessments, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Cambridge University introduced entrance exams in 23 subjects last year, in addition to the three it already had in place.

Dr Sam Lucy, director of admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, wrote to school leaders last year, advising them of the changes and explaining that they were designed to “maintain the effectiveness and fairness of our admissions sys- tem during ongoing qualification reform”.

Meanwhile, Oxford University, which already had 21 entrance exams, has been introducing the Thinking Skills Assessment for a growing number of subjects. It added it for human sciences and chemistry in the last two years, and it is introducing it for history and economics next year. Since last year, Durham, Warwick and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) have rolled out a new mathe- matics test. And in the past two years, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool have all introduced the UK Clinical Aptitude Test for prospective medical students.

Dr Kevin Stannard, a director at the Girls’ Day School Trust, a group of 24 independent schools, said the number of universities adopting their own exams reveals “they are no longer confident that A-levels can select the best candidates”.