Admissions Testing Preparation Effects

Selection to higher education typically includes the use of information about students' attainment, or predicted attainment, in school-leaving examinations such as A-levels. For selective universities and competitive undergraduate degree courses this information provides insufficient scope for discriminating between candidates. Furthermore, candidates are applying increasingly with qualifications from different international educational settings. To help provide a common point of reference across all candidates for a particular course, tests have been introduced as part of the admissions process in many courses at the University of Oxford. This project first explored the relationships between student characteristics and test performance with Oxford University admissions data before turning to study the effects of test preparation on TSA and BMAT for students applying to Oxford. How students prepare for admissions tests and whether this preparation has an impact on their performance in the test is an under-researched area.