Oxford University’s online admissions tests were shambolic | Letters

This week’s Oxford admission tests weren’t as bad as they were portrayed in your article (Oxford University says it will not base admissions on botched online tests, 20 October). They were worse – the most shambolic experience in the 16 years I’ve been running exams in a secondary school. Worse even than when they tried to switch the biomedical admissions tests to online a few years back.

Colleagues and I were unsettled by a two-hour online training session the week before, with presenters unable to give clear answers to questions, at one point saying: “Well we haven’t seen these tests either,” and devoting time to scenarios about what they expected to go wrong.

We abandoned last week’s maths admission test after the candidate’s computer froze for a second time. There was no phone number for Tata Consultancy Services, which runs the tests. The live chat feature was disabled. When it was finally possible to reach Oxford’s undergraduate admissions department, harassed staff were struggling to cope. I was promised a paper test. The password to download it arrived twice, but the actual test came only after we’d sent the candidate home. It came again at 15.15, with an invitation for the candidate to complete it.

Shortly after was a notification that the next day’s physics aptitude test (PAT) would now be on paper, and we might like to go in at 6am to download it; and that the history admissions test (HAT) would now start at 11am instead of 10am, but there was no decision as to whether it would be online or on paper.

At 9.45am the next day we were informed that the HAT would indeed be online at 11am. But not to worry, since if it didn’t work we would be told a contingency plan at 11.45am. In the end it did work, though students found having to view a source document and the answer booklet side by side on a 14-inch screen, with electronic highlighting, less than ideal.

I received a final email asking me to upload the PAT paper answer booklets (which had to be chopped up and scanned first) about an hour after I’d done so and had received confirmation on screen. Just a final reminder of two days where almost nothing had gone right.

Shame on you, Tata. And shame on you, Oxford. Our students deserve better than this.
Paul McGillivray
St Albans

Oxford University must acknowledge that maths candidates also suffered from the botched online exams last week. The university has come clean about English literature (“No candidate will be deselected, ie not shortlisted, on the basis of their ELAT [English literature admissions test] score”). What about the maths test?

My son is applying to read maths and was kicked off the server 30 minutes into the exam. The questions he needed to answer disappeared. After repeated efforts to get back online and the intervention of the school’s IT department, it became apparent that the problem was Oxford’s server. His connection was later restored, but he attends a comprehensive with limited examination-room space and the maths candidates were joined midway through their exam by the ELAT candidates. The English candidates’ servers also crashed and the disruption and mayhem resumed. The fault lies entirely with the university and its provider. These tests should all be discounted. We wait with bated breath for a proposal from Oxford University that will, in their spokesperson’s words “ensure no one is disadvantaged by these events”.
Christopher Bowen
Great Rissington, Gloucestershire