NOW that the cat is thoroughly among the pigeons, and the justice or injustice of Oxford admissions is all over the papers, it is a good moment to think whether we are really as attached as we say to the present admissions system. Even if we like it, the system is stretched to busting, as are the tutors who operate it. Of course, no changes - eliminating interviews, reintroducing the entrance examination, moving to a post-A level admissions date, or anything else - will appease all of Oxford's critics. They have mutually contradictory agendas, and the price of appeasing one is to antagonise another. In which case, we might consider our own concerns.
There are two obvious injustices associated with Oxford admissions, and they both stem from the fact that the offer of a place comes from individual colleges. The first injustice is simply a matter of the odds; the numbers applying to any given college in any given discipline vary dramatically from one year to another. Although talent, energy, and previous knowledge will always help a good candidate, and their absence will always hurt a less good one, it seems unfair that the amount of competition a candidate faces should vary so arbitrarily with the accident of which college she or he has put down as a first choice.
The second is that because college tutors vary so much in what they count as desirable qualities in an incoming student, a candidate's chances of appealing to a tutor vary considerably from one college to another. This matters less in subjects such as maths, where - not very surprisingly - the Oxford intake looks exactly like the intake of other top universities, and matters more in subjects like English and History where it looks very different. But as a matter of justice, applicants in a given subject ought to face the same standards across the University, and it is obvious that in many subjects they don't. We are in intention a meritocracy, and tutors do not in general think they may take just whomever they like; but given the variety of plausible views about what constitutes merit, and the variety of views about how to detect it from the inadequate evidence we have in front of us, there is too little predictability about just what candidates must do to get admitted.
This points in one direction - the need for a more centralised admissions system. We make concessions to this need by our pool procedures, but they are palliatives; what is needed is to start by creating a pool of admitted candidates. But as (almost) everyone from the Vice-Chancellor downwards says, the one thing that is unshakeably Oxford is the insistence of tutors on seeing and choosing the students they are going to teach. Tutors won't give up interviews; they won't give up the present admissions system - even though it's a recent development for tutors to take any interest whatever in the admission of commoners, and the idea that tutors couldn't possibly teach students they haven't chosen is pure superstition. Until recently, tutors elected the scholars and heads of house let in the rest.
There may be a way of squaring this circle. Admission should be a matter of being declared admitted by a central panel. But students should certainly choose which colleges they want to go to - they should list anything up to half a dozen preferences if they want to. And tutors should certainly decide which of the admitted students they wish to teach - they should rank the students they have seen, and whose papers they have read, so they would end up teaching those where their wishes and the panel's judgments have coincided. It would be extremely unlikely that any student would be thought admissible by a panel and unacceptable by every single college - and since that situation would necessarily mean that some college had room for the candidate, it would be obvious enough which had to grit its teeth and take her or him.
The obvious difficulty of running such a system would be that we'd need 'admitters' as well as schools examiners, prelims examiners, and every other sort of examiner we presently need. But this may be less of a problem than it seems. Some of the assessment of candidates amounts to not much more than ticking off their GCSEs, school reports, and publiclv available materials. The Sutton Trust is quite right to think that we could decently use an aptitude test or two - the medics and one or two other disciplines do so already; they are a considerable help in steadying one's judgment about candidates, and they lend themselves to uniform treatment. So the analogy with being a schools examiner is imperfect; we could use some hired help.
We might also try one of the psychometric tests that employers in the wider world are so fond of. Since every applicant will have a minimum of three As at A level and ten As and A*s at GCSE - as they will when we go over to post-qualification admissions - the difference between those who will flourish here and those who won't is going to depend on energy, ambition, self-reliance, sociability, and qualities that won't necessarily show up in more narrowly intellectual aptitude tests. Put those together with some written work, and we've got as much data as we can hope to use. If trained help does a first read and our colleagues pick the winners, we'll do vastly better than Harvard or Princeton even try to do.
Meanwhile, the fans of interviews and the enthusiasts for college autonomy can relax. Instead of interviewing far too many applicants far too fast, they can see a few here and a few there throughout the autumn and winter, read their application materials at leisure, and draw up a rank order whose details won't make all the difference between getting into Oxford and a lingering sense -of grievance. And we can spend the following months much as we do after Schools, grumbling about the ones who got away, or about the extraordinary inability of our colleagues to see the virtues - and flaws - that we saw in the candidates. Not everything has to change at once.
Alan Ryan is warden of New College, Oxford.