The University of Cambridge has sent out its first offers to have been made following entrance exams in 30 years.

Following the introduction of admission assessments for the majority of degree courses, many of the applicants who received their offers on Saturday had had to sit a test as well as the traditional interview.

Until they fell out of favour in the 1980s, entrance exams used to be mandatory for all Cambridge applicants invited to interview. In more recent years, colleges have developed a wide range of methods of assessing applicants before their interviews.

The introduction of the tests was announced in a letter sent out to UK schools and colleges last year by Dr Sam Lucy, the University’s director of admissions. In the letter, she explained that the change was a response to “teacher and student feedback, a desire to harmonise and simplify our existing use of written assessments and a need to develop new ways to maintain the effectiveness and fairness of our admissions system during ongoing qualification reform.”

Speaking to Varsity this week, Dr Lucy said that the University was not yet in a position to comment on the outcomes of the assessments, but “initial indications were positive.”

However, some have voiced fears that the assessments could disadvantage students from backgrounds that are already underrepresented at Cambridge. It has been suggested that privately-educated students are likely to perform better than applicants from state schools, thanks to better, more intensive coaching from their teachers.

An applicant currently attending an independent school told Varsity that “no one knew anything about what the test would be like because there was only one practice paper so it was really difficult to revise for.” They added that an applicant’s performance “depended on how self-motivated he/she was because there wasn’t any teacher help and it relied a lot on extracurricular reading.”

Sample questions from new Cambridge entrance exams released

Sara Williams, a pupil at a comprehensive school who applied to study Engineering, said: “I struggled a lot more on the engineering section of the test as the questions were written in a style which I had not come across before, and it involved an application of maths and physics which I haven’t learned in such detail yet.” Preparation, she said, had been difficult: “We worked through the specimen paper on the Cambridge website and some of the PAT papers [the Physics Aptitude Test used by Oxford University]. My Director of Sixth Form gave me some resources as well but I didn’t work through anything with teachers in school.”

Mature applicants are not required to take the admission tests, in part due to concerns raised by Professor Sir Richard Evans, president of Wolfson College. He stressed that mature applicants may be less accustomed to taking exams than their younger counterparts, as they are likely to have spent an extended period of time out of formal education.