Word is they’re bringing in pre-interview admissions tests around here. I’ve got a few issues with this. Fasten your seatbelts, here they are.

The first thing is that written exams favour certain people, namely those who have been taught by the age of seventeen to excel in written exams. Those people, obviously, are most likely to come from the kinds of schools which do well in all sorts of written exams, including A-levels. And guess what? Those people are already disproportionately good at getting into Cambridge. Now, I’m not having any of this ‘but if they’re the cleverest then it’s fair’ nonsense. If you’ve been paying attention to anything since the beginning of time then you’ll know that people who are good at passing exams aren’t the only ones who deserve a place at the University of Their Choice.

We shouldn’t really need to talk about this but apparently we do. Apparently some people need reminding that systems invented by people in certain demographics for people in those certain demographics don’t work in favour of people from all demographics. For example, this promised new exam system is going to directly disadvantage students from less privileged backgrounds who attend schools with more strained resources, and who lack the luxury of the extra tutoring necessary to pass an Oxbridge admissions test. Interviews allow an academic to speak to the applicant, face to face, and gauge their personality, their interests, their love for the subject – and even then, the statistics prove year in, year out that private schools are better at getting kids in. Add a written exam beforehand and a load of hard-working kids who deserve to at least meet the interviewer won’t. And this has its own knock-on effect. Knowing that they’re far less likely to pass a pre-interview exam than their private school counterparts, the number of students applying from less privileged schools will drop. When you make the application process look intimidating, you discourage people who haven’t grown up being told that they’re the future masters of the universe. Then you promote class divisions, and before you know it, Cambridge is the kind of elitist snob-hole you spend so much time insisting it isn’t.

So here’s the next thing that happens: the division between Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities grows even more. You either go to a good university, or you go to Oxbridge and that’s something else altogether. You create this aura around your own stone walls, and look down over the parapets at everyone who worked just as hard but just wasn’t as lucky. Then you feel smugly self-satisfied, even though you don’t deserve to. You trick yourself into thinking that you earned your success when really all you did was trip other people up. Tripping up your opponents doesn’t count as winning; it’s actually cheating.

Before we move on, let’s just consider one more way in which the new exam system will disadvantage less privileged applicants. Back in the day, everyone applying to Oxford or Cambridge spent a seventh term at school preparing for their entrance exam once they’d achieved the necessary A-level results (think The History Boys). Funnily enough, those who will do best in entrance exams now are those who are a year older and have spent an extra year learning how to pass exams. Those people are going to be the ones who can afford to take gap years. A whole lot of people don’t have that option – they either have to get a bloody degree so they can get a job, or just cut to the chase and get a job. An extra hurdle won’t make the competition fairer. It’s going to exclude people from the competition altogether.

So why has the university decided to take this bizarre step back into the 1980s? They say it’s to regulate admissions requirements across colleges, but they could do that with at-interview tests, and anyway, colleges look for different things in applicants so I don’t really buy it. I think it’s far more likely that the university is trying to economise on interview time by weeding out more applicants beforehand. Although I understand that this must be necessary – I like my supervisors, and I feel for them around Christmas when they’re swamped with undergrad interviews – there must be a better way to do it. Couldn’t they make the interview period longer to reduce time constraints? Couldn’t faculties take a larger role in managing the process, rather than leaving some colleges understaffed? How about, I don’t know, shelling out a bit more pay to academics who work long hours trying to make fair decisions about who deserves a place?

I hope I’m wrong. I hope this change doesn’t de-diversify Cambridge even more and return it to the dark ages where only the richest can afford this kind of education. I hope I’m worried for no reason – but, given the current political trajectory of the university, I don’t think I am.