I was running an open day today 😆 Good halfway house, I get to hang around the university and they actually pay me money to be there. I’d struggle to get into a good one, these days. Though I was looking enviously at the BASE Downhill HND today, that’d be alright!
Oh OK, I spend all day at work on STW, let’s do some work at 2.30am
A pal brought her daughter up for this too today.
Sadly as she’s sitting her As in 2 different years, they said they wouldn’t even look at her application (Psychology).
Yeah, some unis are very uptight about single sitting- it does make sense on the face of it if you’re comparing like for like then achieving a set of grades in one year is obviously way harder than 2 or 3. And edinburgh’s entry standard for psychology is one of the UK’s hardest
But not everyone’s so fussed, we (Heriot Watt) basically find it’s not actually a very useful indicator after all, because it just ignores all the reasons that someone might not do it all in one bite, it correlates strongly with disrupted education, learning challenges etc and that tends to grow a better student not a worse. And after all most scottish kids do 2 sittings. Basically every university has their own ideas of what makes a good student. (and their own supply/demand pressures! It’s not really about quality at all, except tangentially)
If she’s really got her heart set on Edinburgh- they are good for psychology, especially research psychology- then there’s longer roads to get there, college etc. Edinburgh’s college articulation is frankly not very good, I think it’s basically not in their DNA so they work really hard at it and it just doesn’t really stick… But they do take it seriously, they have a really good guy in charge of it all.
All 4 Edinburgh unis do psychology, if it’s the city not the uni that she’s so sold on. Our approach is a bit different, it’s very applied, less research/theory and more practice based, we actually beat Edinburgh handsomely on student satisfaction (Napier beat us both) and match them on graduate prospects, but we get killed on other metrics- entry requirements and research, we don’t do much psych research. And we have way better trees, and 8 more swans.