The problem with UCAS personal statements

When Lord Browne’s 2010 Review of Higher Education acknowledged that for some students, “exam grades alone are not the best predictor of potential to succeed at university”, it drew on growing evidence that state-schooled university entrants perform better in their degree than identically qualified independent school students.

One response was to increase the focus on non-academic indicators of aptitude, including the UCAS personal statement. But do such indicators help university admissions tutors to cut through more rigid measures of attainment to sort high-potential applicants from similarly qualified peers? Or do they actually present more opportunities for already-advantaged applicants to advertise their class-determined credentials further?

Speaking in April 2011, universities minister David Willetts argued that: “What universities have to be able to do is to look beyond the headline A level grades to what that individual’s potential might be.” 

Previously, he had given examples of the kind of indicators that might be used: “Things such as applicants’ CVs, personal statements and their potential to benefit from a particular course.” 

However, closer inspection reveals that these three indicators soon collapse into one. Applicants don’t submit a CV (they simply complete a series of character-limited fields with factual information), nor do they comment on their suitability for individual courses. Only the personal statement – a 4,000-character “free response” – can be used to assess potential.

Unfortunately, academic research on this topic is scarce. Those studies that have looked at the personal statement, mostly conducted by university medical schools, find little correlation between the quality of the application and the subsequent achievement of the student. 

More alarming is that no study has examined the connection between applicants’ schooling background and the nature of the personal statement they submit. This despite the 2004 Schwartz Report speculating that “some staff and parents advise to the extent that the personal statement cannot be seen as the applicant’s own work”.

To address this gap in knowledge, I began collecting some data of my own. I took one large department at one of the UK’s top universities (home to courses in social science subjects such as sociology and economics) and obtained the personal statements submitted by all 5,276 applicants for 2010 entry. 

To keep comparisons fair, I needed to control for academic achievement. Meaningful conclusions could not be drawn by comparing very strong students with much weaker ones. My data was therefore restricted to applicants who subsequently achieved grades of BBB at A level. All overseas applicants were eliminated, as were all applications from mature students. 

The remaining statements were tagged according to the type of school the applicant attended. Comprehensive school, 6th-form college and independent school applicants each comprised a similar share of the database; grammar school applicants a slightly smaller proportion. The final database was made up of 309 personal statements, comprising about 200,000 words of text.

The UCAS website offers several pages of advice about how to compose a personal statement, including a list of dos and don’ts, a how-to video and a mindmap PDF. Snippets of advice are provided from a series of admissions tutors, often underlining the importance of “English language and grammar at a standard suitable for entry to higher education”. Several unaffiliated student websites provide sample statements for applicants to consider and in recent years a number of “how to” books have appeared on the market.

However, writing a personal statement can prove difficult for many young people. UCAS urges candidates to “stand out from the crowd”, but, by definition, this is not something that every candidate can do. Indeed, even when it comes to superficial features of the statement, major differences arose between the quality of the statements.

In order to examine applicants’ standard of written English, the database was searched for clear examples of spelling and punctuation errors. Prescriptive rules of English, such as that involving the split infinitive, were ignored. Only unambiguous mistakes such as “I am re-sitting two modular’s” and “the skills I have already aquired” were counted.