Unless you apply to a very specific university (e.g. Oxbridge) or course (e.g. Medicine), it is very unlikely you will be interviewed or take an admissions test.

This means that for the overwhelming majority of courses, universities decide whether to give you a place or not based on the following information:

Personal statement: you can say you’ve done absolutely anything on it without ever needing to prove it (assuming you don’t get interviewed), and anyone can write it for you

Teacher references: any half decent teacher is going to make their students sound as good as possible, pretty pointless in my opinion

Predicted grades: definitely important but often not accurate and overinflated (or even unfairly low for some students), particularly among private schools

GCSEs: the only actual verifiable piece of evidence you have of your academic ability (and even this wasn’t the case during covid)

It seems to me that given how little ‘useful’ information universities are provided with to decide on who to give offers to, it means that a lot of decisions are purely down to luck and the system doesn’t properly assess applicants’ abilities, which is surprising given how important university is. I appreciate that it will be difficult to ever have a perfect system, but the current one seems really poor to me.

Any ideas on how it could be improved?