This article is a bit out of date - I started it at the beginning of our Edinburgh trip, and then put it on hold while I wrote up the Epic Review of Epic. So I'm coming back to this about three weeks after it was actually current news but - as we'll see later - this is kind of appropriate.

Last year we covered the rather sad story of Josh from Surrey, a boy who got four As at A-Level but was rejected from Oxford. We said at the time that one of these came up pretty much every year, and lo and behold this year we got another one.

This time it's a Philippa Scott who got six “A” grades at A-level and didn't get in to any universities at all. I saw this reported in the Daily Express and, unusually, it wasn't used to bash Oxbridge, instead being taken as an opportunity to complain about the government's failure to provide enough university places (“rationing hope” as one newspaper rather histrionically described it - perhaps it's my inner socialist but I rather think that “rationing” hope is better than the alternative, which is selling it to the highest bidder).

Unlike poor old Josh from Surrey, Philippa responded to the rejection with grace - saying that she would be trying to make the most out of her year out, although one of her teachers is apparently making a fuss about “social engineering”. What I find particularly annoying about these stories is the lack of understanding they betray on the part of the journalists who continue to lambaste the British University system.

Here are some facts of which the tabloid journalists who wrote the article appear to be ignorant.

1. University Admissions are dealt with in late autumn.

A-level students are required to begin the UCAS (University Admissions) process almost as soon as they start their second year. Whether somebody is accepted to, or rejected from, a university is decided long before their A-Level results come out. Philippa Scott did not have six A-Grades when she was rejected from Cambridge, Warwick, Durham, Bristol and UCL. She had zero A-Grades. She might have had some AS results, which might have been A grades. She might have been predicted six A grades. But she did not, at the time she was rejected, actually possess six A-grades in full A-Levels.

2. A-Levels Are Not University Admission Tokens

Like Josh from Surrey, journalists seem to think that getting into Oxford (or Durham, or Warwick) is simply a matter of doing enough A-levels. This is not true. Universities accept or reject candidates for a wide variety of complex reasons.

It takes only a moment's reflection to realize how utterly batshit the alternative would be. The implicit assumption is that a candidate who possesses n + 1 A-Levels is better suited for any university course than one who possesses a mere n A-Levels. Students are not, according to this doctrine, individuals with complex and nuanced sets of strengths and weaknesses, abilities and potentials. Everything you could ever possibly know about a student is contained in a single integer value.

3. Having Lots of A-Levels Is Not A Sign of Intelligence

Rather, it is a mark of privilege.

Ever noticed how none of these kids who get a billion A-levels ever went to Scummsville Comp or Lower Craptown High?

Doing more than three or four A-Levels is, to be frank, a luxury. It takes resources that a lot of schools simply do not possess. It may require additional classes to be scheduled, or for them to be rearranged so that French no longer clashes with Biology. It requires a level of administration and support that many schools simply can not offer. By giving students with high numbers of A-grades the primacy that the tabloids (qualified as they are to set education policy) demand, it would actively discriminate against students who had not been allowed to pad their CVs by taking multiple redundant qualifications.

I'm not knocking the achievement of A level students, really I'm not (although as I pointed out last year, I teach at an international school, and I've had students not only get four A-grades at A-Level, but had them do it in a foreign language). But the fact is that doing five or six A-Levels simply does not make you an appreciably better candidate for university than one who does three or four. All it requires is that the student be willing to do nine or ten extra hours work a week. Yes, that's a fair amount of effort, but I'm not particularly convinced that the time couldn't be better spent, say, reading good books or practicing a musical instrument. Or for that matter having a social life.

4. Breadth of Knowledge is not Depth of Knowledge

Something that always confuses me in conversations with Americans is when people talk about “majoring” in something at university. In the UK - at least at traditional universities like Cambridge - you study one subject at university and one only. Yes, universities are looking for people with a breadth of interest, but if you're interviewing three people for an English Literature course, and you've got one who demonstrates an unbridled passion for the subject, one who can talk knowledgeably about Foucault, and one who has A-Level Chemistry, you take the one with the passion and the one with the knowledge, and ditch the scientist.

I've talked before about stage magic. One of the factors stage magic relies on is that people will fill in the details of a situation based on the limited evidence they have. You see a girl go into a box, and until you see her leave you assume she's still in there. Journalists rely on the same sort of assumptions. You hear that a girl applied for a place on an English Literature course, you hear that she had six A-Levels, you assume that she was therefore well qualified to study English Literature at university. If I wanted to be all Johnathon Creek about it, I'd point out that we don't even know that Phillipa Scott did A-Level English.

Having taken six A-Levels is in no way evidence that a student is especially skilled in any one of them.

5. Independent Random Events are Independent and Random

Any given student has a non-zero chance of being rejected from any given university. This is true even of students who take six A-Levels.

In fact, I might suggest that it is particularly true of students who take six A-Levels.

Taking six A-Levels will not impress Oxbridge, for all of the reasons outlined above - Oxford and Cambridge do not have, and have never had, a policy of requiring students to do more than four A-levels. Worse, taking six A-levels and applying to Cambridge might actually have harmed Pippa Scott's chances of being accepted by her second choice universities.

Cambridge, Warwick, Durham, Bristol and UCL are five of the best universities in the country. They are, by and large, in direct competition for candidates. Universities can only make a finite number of offers in any given year, and they are not going to want to waste those offers on people who will probably go to other universities.

When I applied for Oxford, I also applied for Warwick (and indeed when I went to Warwick on the open day they basically said that they assumed that anybody who was applying to them was also applying to Oxbridge, which sort of put me off the university) and several other top universities, but I also made sure I had a couple of insurance options - universities that would accept me if the others didn't. Universities that - to put it bluntly - had lower standards, just in case I fucked everything up.

Pippa Scott didn't do that. Her university choices almost guaranteed that if she didn't get into Cambridge, she wouldn't get in anywhere. The admissions standards for each of the five universities she applied to are so close that any one of them was justified in making the assumption that even if they made her an offer, she'd probably go somewhere else.

Was it absolutely certain that she would be rejected from all five universities? Of course not. But neither was it particularly improbable that she would be rejected from any one. Cambridge would look at her six A Levels and say “obvious CV padding, not Cambridge material” everybody else would have looked at them and said “obviously going to Cambridge, not worth making an offer. Even if we accept that she was a good enough candidate to be 90% likely to be accepted to any of her five universities, that still gave her a one in one-hundred-thousand chance of being rejected from all of them. With thousands of students applying for university every year, something like this was bound to happen eventually.

So by the time this article goes live, Pippa Scott will be on her year out. And she'll be doing fine. And next year she'll go to university, and nobody's life will be ruined, and nobody will be any worse off than they would have been if she'd been accepted this year instead.

But of course, next year we'll have yet another story about somebody who got five As, and applied for Oxbridge, and didn't get in.