College Notes Undergraduate Admissions 2021 by Glen Rangwala (1993)
The incoming students have all been living through the various disruptions of the pandemic. Many have high intellectual and professional potential but have received patchy educational provision over the past 18 months. There has been a good range of initiatives, from both the University and College, to put together induction programmes of various sorts, both specific to individual subjects and more generally oriented, to ensure students have a solid grounding in relevant study skills. Our incoming students have been participating in these courses remotely over the summer, with the aim of ensuring that they are all fully prepared to begin degree-level study by October. Last year’s first attempts to have preparatory study courses seem to have been useful and were appreciated – and this may be one initiative coming out of the current era that we keep for the future. Admissions interviews were all held remotely in 2020 and will be again in 2021. There were legitimate question-marks beforehand about how reliable such interviews could be and whether the students applying to us would be able to engage suitably with the interviewers’ armoury of challenging questions. In practice, though, the arrangement turned out largely to be effective. Candidates in the sciences had drawing tablets and so interviewees could see the equations they were scribbling down as they worked through the problems. Various forms of screen-sharing allowed the discussion of images or texts. Although many of us interviewers prefer face-to-face discussions to spending all day with T R I N I T Y A N N UA L R ECOR D 2021 189
FELLOWS, STAFF AN D ST U DEN TS
Trinity will be welcoming 197 new students to start their first degrees in October 2021, plus another three students who will be starting undergraduate degrees with affiliated status. In the previous year, we admitted 225 students – the highest number taken in a single year since 1964 – due to the Government’s sudden change in the process for determining A level grades. This created a range of challenges in accommodating and teaching such a large number and compelled a year of continual improvisation. Returning to a standard entry of 200 is an indication not that we are post-COVID (which may not happen for a long while yet), but that we are post-crisis.
