We have more data about the grades applicants need to enter university than ever before - but do we know how these decisions are made? David Kernohan applies himself
So we’ve had the UCAS “grades on entry” tool since March and ever since then I’ve been meaning to explore them in more depth.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen data on entry grades – UCAS has traditionally reported these at a subject level and for various demographics as a part of the equalities release that usually turns up alongside the January end of cycle report. It is, however, the first time we’ve seen these alongside the grades that providers more often present to students as “entry requirement” grades.
The other fascinating developments within this initiative are maximum (highest) and minimum (grades), and entry rates (the proportion of people who apply to this course who get a place). But what can we learn from them?
All the grades
It has taken a long time for UCAS to get the sector to the point it is willing to have all these pieces of information on the same page. There have been reputational concerns and commercial concerns – some of which have been addressed by the addition of a (plain text) statement on the way contextual offer making works. But we don’t (yet?) get this information as open data: it’s on the website, but there’s no structured version for us to analyse..
It’s worth systemising the various kinds of grades that get chucked about in these conversations:
Applicant expected grades (someone applying to university from school may feel – based on teacher feedback or personal optimism – that they are on for three Cs)
Entry requirement grades (what we have traditionally seen from providers as the entry tariff for a particular course. Applicants generally use these to decide which courses to apply to)
Teacher predicted grades (the ones on the UCAS form – providers use these in offer making decisions)
Actual grades (the results an applicant got on results day, and the starting point to decisions on both sides as to where or whether to take up a university place)
Entry grades (the grades that a university actually accepted for entry on that course: which may differ from entry requirements due to offer modification or clearing activity)
Ideally to understand offermaking and decision making we would have access to all of these sets of grades at a course level. We currently see 3 and 4 at a broad subject level in the end of cycle data, 2 and 5 are on the UCAS website pages for each course (most of the time, there are opt outs), and we kind of have to infer 1 from applicant behaviour.
Pharmacy
For me, entry requirement grades are a signal in a marketplace. They contain a great deal of implicit information – you could argue grades tell you about the quality or scope of the course, the prestige or desirability of the provider, the marketing intentions of the provider, or the value of the final qualification. That’s a lot – grades are not an efficient signal, and a part of the thinking behind releasing entry grades was to make this signal more usable by students.
It is technically possible to “scrape” information from the UCAS pages automatically. I have chosen not to do this here, but I have manually gathered information about one particular course that I find interesting.
Pharmacy (MPharm) is a course where content is tightly specified by a professional body. The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPharmC) tightly specifies what an MPharm should contain and what opportunities it should offer students. GPharmC regularly inspects provision and lists qualifying courses on its website.
There are 34 accredited full-time, four year, MPharm degrees offered in the UK. Four of these (Bangor, Leicester, Sheffield, Teesside) are new for 2025. As far as the available information goes these courses are directly equivalent – if you complete an MPharm and a qualifying preregistration year you get to register to be a pharmacist, and there are no indications that you are advantaged or disadvantaged by your choice of provider when you become a pharmacist.
To all intents and purposes, each one of these courses is exactly equivalent in terms of setting someone up to become a pharmacist. Despite this, we see a range of entry grades and offermaking behaviour.