Unlike most other universities, at Cambridge, undergraduate admissions are the responsibility of the college: university departments are required to teach any student who is admitted by a college. Some departments, however, limit the number of students that a college can admit in their subject area.

Students apply for admission to the colleges in the autumn. Subsequently, Directors of Studies shortlist applicants for interviews in each college in collaboration with that college’s Admissions Tutor. Shortlisted students are interviewed twice by teams of two interviewers, who ask them tough questions with short time limits: a recipe for stress!

Selected students are provisionally admitted. They must receive suitable marks in their end-of-school standardised exams (the A levels in the UK) before admission is confirmed.

Pools

Undergraduate applicants are allowed to apply to only one college. This creates an immediate problem, in that some colleges may receive many strong applicants while others may receive none of suitable calibre. To alleviate this, colleges make offers to the strongest applicants and place students who are strong enough to be admitted at other colleges in a ‘pool’. At the end of the first round of admissions, typically early January, college Directors of Studies ‘go fishing in the winter pool’ and look for students to whom an offer might be made. An arcane system of preferences and rounds is used to ensure fairness amongst the bidders for the strongest students in the pool.

Some students may not make the grade in their final exams, which opens up slots in colleges. This only becomes known in July, when the A level exam results are announced. So, a second ‘summer pool party’ is held at that time to backfill slots.