It seems I have a dirty little secret. It goes everywhere with me at university. Occasionally it announces itself loudly at a formal and others blush. I have had enough of it so I am, once and for all, going to let it out. I didn’t apply to my college. I was pooled there.

I understand that I may have lost readers after my introductory paragraph. After all, this statement could be viewed as an admission of my inferior intellect, college, and, hell, probably my inferior personality as well. But at this moment, the beginning of my final year at Cambridge, it is time to address the snobbery surrounding the pool and us poor “poolees” who clambered in by some Christmas miracle on King’s Parade. From the downward glances, the vapid comments about the benefits of a “good walk” and the outright scoffs I have received over the last two years, most visions of the pool seem to include my kindred and I being washed up from the murky depths of the Cam, smothered in the green slime of our substandard essays.

The procedure for Cambridge admissions is clear: in whichever college or faculty one’s interest may lie, the sole criterion for entrance is a candidate’s perceived academic potential. Frustrating for those with three county hockey caps tucked inside their UCAS forms, but a blessing for those statistical analysts among us who are trying to make sense of matriculation stats using only GCSE maths and a red pencil. And since it’s the academic stuff they’re interested in, there can only be one true measure of the success of once-pooled students: their Tripos results. So here come the figures.

May the following paragraph confound disbelievers and be pinned to the banks of the Cam for future wash-ups to cling to. Dr Hilarie Bateman, New Hall Admissions Tutor, has discovered that “average Baxter scores for Part II exam results (for 2000-06) show no significant difference between those admitted to their first choice and those admitted via the January pool.” This pattern is true across both arts and science subjects. Additionally (and these fifty words are for all you chirping cynics), University Director of Undergraduate Admissions Dr Geoff Parks, having conducted a statistical study of engineering examination results based on five years’ worth of data gathered during his tenure as Engineering subject convener, has found that the difference between pooled and direct-entry candidates is “negligible”. A clear bill of academic health, then.

Yet I doubt this conclusion will entirely tackle the brand of snobbery most commonly associated with the pool, that of inter-collegiate rivalry. My statistics on individual poolees is all very well, but few would contest the idea that on occasion “very good” colleges get very good students through the pool. Sometimes, that is: the “odd one”, where there are “special circumstances”, a candidate who was running a temperature of 104 at the initial interview. Colleges that are made up of twenty, thirty, even fifty per cent pooled students are just plain suspect, right? It was time for my graphics calculator/red pencil combo once more.

By ranking the colleges in ascending order based on the percentage of offers that were made through the winter pool, and comparing the resulting list with the Tompkins Table valid for that intake, I explored the hypothesis that colleges with a greater number of pooled candidates would flounder with Tompkins, the presumption being that these colleges have a lower standard of applicant, hence their fishing around in the pool, and that they therefore take the chaff with the wheat. But no such relationship was evident from the two charts. I present the most startling individual case I could find that proves the pool to be an insignificant factor in college examination success. In the 2005-2006 admissions cycle Clare was the only college not to offer any places through the pool, meaning that that year group were all first-choice applicants. The first year that these students sat Tripos exams on behalf of their college was 2007. In the 2007 Tompkins Table (insert drum roll here), Clare College took seventeenth place. This was below both Fitzwilliam and Churchill, in thirteenth and fourteenth places respectively, who made thirty-two and twenty-four per cent of their offers through the 2005 pool. I admit that there may be other confounding circumstances but the pattern, or non-pattern as the case apparently is, remains clear: the percentage of pooled candidates does not affect college ranking. Indeed, if you care to look, the Tompkins Table dispenses with a number of inflated college myths.

At a formal last year I told the person sitting next to me which college I was at, to which he immediately offered the query, “Oh, and where did you actually apply?” Since then, I have wondered whether he was casting aspersions on my college, my loyalty to it, or simply my academic competence. I only wish I had had my college scarf and this barrage of statistics with me. I could have taken my lead from the “top”. CUSU President Mark Fletcher once regaled open-day applicants with the virtues of Jesus College, where he was JCR President, before revealing he hadn’t applied there. Oh God, now his secret has slipped out too.

Natalie Woolman