@sattut I took a quick look at a STEP 2 & 3 paper. The format is identical to the math tripos, you select your preferred questions, each question is marked out of 20, and I expect you need 14 out of 20 or more to get an alpha. So definitely worth bearing in mind that this is a good representation of what you are expected to do in Cambridge math.
After 25 years of not doing any real math, I can still do a few questions, and I am pretty convinced I would have been able to do the majority of them when I was in high school.
FWIW in the UK I did math and further math at a selective private school (top 10 in the country) and we were taught very thoroughly about all of these topics (by teachers who had been Oxbridge mathematicians themselves). A level math was sufficiently easy that I expected to get 100% in that exam and I was probably close to that in further math too. Our school chose a harder examining board (A levels can be set by several different boards, it’s not standardized like AP here) to give us more of a challenge! But only S-levels/STEP were at all challenging. I’d guess I was in the top couple of hundred in my age group nationally, but as I mentioned before, there were plenty of much better mathematicians in my college (I’d say I was somewhere around 10th out of 40 math students in my college, perhaps 30th out of 200-250 in the whole university in the year). I did end up with a first and then did a math PhD at Cambridge, but I’m not an academic (I did the PhD because I wasn’t interested in getting a job at that point). Apologies for the humblebrag, but hopefully that gives people some sense of the benchmark.
Hope I’m not scaring @hopefullywecan too much, but here’s what tippy top UK prep for math looks like. For A levels (last two years of high school) I was in a class of 10 doing math, further math and physics. We had 4-5 hours of math and physics each day, with three specialist math teachers (pure, applied and probability/stats) plus a physics teacher. All 4 were Oxbridge graduates, two with PhDs. 4 of the 10 students in my year went to Oxbridge, 3 of us got firsts.
Now many people don’t get that, even in the UK, but you can see why private schools are so successful at getting people into Oxbridge. And most of the top students come from that background.
Based on what I’ve seen regarding the MAT, I am confident I could score 80+ with practice, but just looking at the STEP (have not tried any questions), it’s just miles beyond me because I have not been exposed to much of the material. In that sense, I would definitely be substantially behind the top students who can comfortably solve many of those problems.
Interesting post about the British “public school” education. Those STEP exams give an idea of what it accomplishes.
The US and British education have developed differently, and the US approach may be closer to the system at the time we split off. It is a different culture in the US, where money is relatively more important as opposed to class. Also, top universities are private and do not pretend to make admissions decisions on objective criteria or give reasons for their decisions. The US system is less specialized, and most applicants to top schools generally did OK in calculus and are at a high level in a foreign language, etc. I certainly didn’t attend a top private school, but my impression is their emphasis is not on standardized test preparation, and that nonacademic activities, such as sports, are important.
Those STEP exams are interesting. I would recommend strong math students take a look at the STEP 1 past papers. I don’t know if many educated under the US system could do well on the STEP 2 and 3 exams.
The help that you all have provided has definitely aided me, and in fact, my interest in applying to some UK universities has increased significantly as well. I appreciate the willingness to help me, and the prompt insightful responses have definitely been a pleasant surprise.
@hopefullywecan About teacher recs: the point HazeGrey was making is that with the US and the British system (particularly the tutorial system at Oxford) being so different, a teacher who had been at Oxford themselves being able to say “this kid is perfect for Oxford because…” would carry a lot of weight. It’s not about whether their alma mater was an esteemed university or not, it’s specifically whether it was a British esteemed university.
A teacher educated a US university, esteemed or not, would hardly know what Oxford were looking for - Visiting Students at Oxford, all of them, naturally, from very esteemed US universities, tended to be shocked at how different the expectations in learning style were.
So, a teacher’s recommendation that talked about how diligent you were, always handing in your homework in time? An Oxford tutor couldn’t care less.
A teachers rec talking about how you were such a hard and dedicated worker you could turn a B or a C in your AP class into an A? Probably detrimental even if the teacher were from Harvard and the school the most esteemed prep school in the country.
A teacher from Podunk state talking about how you were the most naturally brilliant math student they had ever seen at Podunk high and how you were making intuitive leaps theyd never seen a high school student make and making As effortlessly? Now that might make them look twice.
We can’t shout out “different!” often and loud enough.
To help your teachers, you might actually want to make a list of the specific qualities Oxford is looking for and ask the teacher to describe how you fit them.
Out of curiosity, for admission, (comparing to U.S. schools), would Oxford and Cambridge be more open or indifferent to students (of younger age)? I am ~13 years old.
Actually Oxbridge give a slight boost in the assessment to younger students. In other words if you have two equal candidates and one is 16 and the other 18, the tiebreaker will usually go to the 16 year old, as the 18 year old would be expected to be more mature and accomplished. That’s a difference to the US where age is not a factor in choosing who is admitted.
But typically the 16 year old would take a gap year before starting (FWIW I had my Cambridge interview at 15, having skipped 1 year in elementary school and 1 year in high school in the UK, but I took a year off to work after A levels, so was 17 when I started).
They definitely prefer you to be 17 when you start. If you actually want to attend when you are younger than 17, then Oxford is apparently more open to that than Cambridge (look up Ruth Lawrence), but they might require special measures like your parents moving there and renting a house so you can live with them. There is no equivalent of dual enrollment and very little handholding, so it is definitely harder to attend when very young than it would be in the US. UK college life also revolves much more around alcohol since the legal drinking age is 18.
I’m not sure that you info is current, @Twoin18. Certainly, Oxford has become less open to young students as well.In 2012 (maybe 2013?) Oxford said that they were actively moving away from students who would be under 17 when they start. Although the official policy -‘we are open to young applicants (except for medicine)’- is the same, they are increasingly careful about accepting young students, largely b/c it has not proved to be a happy experience for many students, either during or after university (Ruth Lawrence, for example, is clear that she wants a different, more ‘normal’ life for her own kids).
I agree @collegemom3717 that it’s much less doable at a really young age than in the US. Going at 17 rather than 18 is OK, though again probably less common than it used to be (both my wife and I did that) because when I was growing up many kids skipped a grade, and gap years are now much more common. I certainly wouldn’t try and go to Oxbridge early if you weren’t turning 18 during your first term or so.
Hey @sattut here’s a quick update on our earlier discussion about STEP-2/3. I spoke to a very impressive first year girl from Kenya this week who called me as part of my college’s alumni fundraising round. She is doing engineering, and said she had to teach herself further maths from YouTube because they didn’t have a teacher who knew the subject! She did STEP-2 (which is based just on the maths A-level syllabus) and said it was “easy”… On the other hand she was turned down by top US schools because she was lacking in ECs!