Unconditionally yours

I know what it is like to receive an unconditional offer for university. In 1984, when I took the Cambridge entrance exam, if you passed, you then only had to meet the matriculation requirements of the university, which were two Es at A-level. For someone predicted straight As (virtually all Oxbridge candidates), that wasn’t asking a lot. It was hard not to slacken off a little, to take a mental gap year, or six months at any rate, for the last two terms of the sixth form. I slipped to a B in further maths, which seemed an embarrassment at the time, though I know others who took a bigger plunge. What with a real gap year, too, I never really did get back into numbers. After a year at Cambridge I switched out of the engineering course and have not tackled a differential equation ever since.

Unconditional offers, whereby a university accepts applicants regardless of their subsequent A-level performance, came back into the news with a vengeance in January when the new Office for Students revealed that the number of university applicants receiving them had soared from 3,000 in 2013 to 117,000 in 2018.