Oxford must see sense over downgraded students

Elite universities like Oxford and Cambridge don’t have a good track record in taking mitigating circumstances into account. One Oxford history graduate tells me that even though it deemed her to have been ‘very seriously impacted’ by her home circumstances last year, the university declined to bump up her final grade enough – by 0.3 per cent – for her to enter her masters’ course. So what does count as a good enough excuse for missing your grades? Sitting your exams during a pandemic surely would – particularly if, like Soutiam Goodarzi, you’re a member of an underrepresented group that Oxbridge claims they want to uplift. Soutiam is a sixth former eligible for free school meals who, after being predicted a full set of As and A*s, had a place to read medicine at Oxford. She came to the UK with her mother from Iran when she was eleven; overcrowding in London meant she had to wait half a year to go to primary school.