Hello, I’m a US student looking to apply to Oxford in the fall. I’ve heard that conditional offers are the most common offers given to applicants, but wouldn’t that mean that for US students that you cannot commit to colleges? Because for example, if they ask you for another 5 in an AP class, you won’t get that result until July, long after you should’ve committed to a school you applied to.
Yes if you have a conditional offer from the UK then you’ll need to accept at a US school in April and forfeit your deposit after getting AP scores in July. There isn’t a problem with holding both offers, Oxford doesn’t care and your US school wouldn’t know (and expects to have a certain amount of “summer melt” anyway).
It’s worse going the other way round: if you take UK A levels then results don’t come out until mid August after many US colleges have already started. So you can’t wait to see whether or not you met a conditional offer.
Conditional offers at Oxford aren’t as frequent as you might think because most strong US applicants will already have done plenty of APs by junior year, 5+ fives by that time (and ~10 by senior year) isn’t uncommon. Other UK universities don’t make them very often either, because they want overseas full pay students and know it will put off US applicants.
I agree with @Twoin18 in the assumption that most necessary APs would already be in hand for strong applicants. In my son’s case, he had all of his necessary APs completed by the end of junior year (CS A, Calc BC, Physics C). Once he received his Oxford offer, he just had to send in score reports and his offer was finalized/unconditional by the end of that January, His only APs in senior year were micro/macro and they didn’t care about the results of those and never asked for scores.
I’ll mostly agree with @Twoin18 & @HazeGrey - 2 CCer’s who know what they are talking about- but will say that conditional offers are particularly common where one/more of the senior year APs are clearly strongly related to the subject. I have seen a student with 5 “5s”, 3 in relevant subjects, still be given conditions for senior year b/c of relevance.
As noted above, you can accept a US college, being prepared to forfeit a deposit- or you can ‘insure’ with a 2nd UK option. So, you get a conditional from Oxford, and an unconditional (or, like @HazeGrey’s son, an effectively unconditional offer), and you ‘Firm’ Oxford and “Insure” the other.
@collegemom3717 That’s a fair point. In my son’s case that wasn’t applicable, but that doesn’t mean that wouldn’t be the case for others.
“I have seen a student with 5 “5s”, 3 in relevant subjects, still be given conditions for senior year b/c of relevance.”
Completely agree, but I’m somewhat doubtful that the majority of successful US candidates receive a conditional offer, even though most applicants may very well have not completed all the relevant APs by junior year.
My point is simply that to be successful you will need to be far more advanced than a typical strong US applicant and to have gone above and beyond the usual US high school curriculum, for example they like applicants who have participated (and advanced) in Olympiads and similar national/international competitions because it allows for more comparability with other countries. References should also usually be saying that you are the best student in your school (in the subject you are applying for) in the last decade or even in your teacher’s entire career unless you are at a school that sends numerous students to HYPSM each year.