Guide to the Inter-Collegiate Pool

The University of Cambridge receives over 14,500 applications each year and has places for about 3,375 new undergraduates. A decision on the outcome of any application is made by the College dealing with the application. That decision may be:

In a typical year, around 3,000 offers are made directly, and around a further 600 to 800 offers are made by another College through the Pool.

The Pool is a means of evening out applications between Colleges and across subjects, and serves to ensure that Colleges are accepting applicants at comparable high levels of ability. During the Pool, which takes place over a two-day period, the application forms and papers of each pooled applicant are available for consultation by Admissions Tutors and Directors of Studies. Normal practice is to work through all the applicants in a particular subject and select a number to be re-interviewed. This process may well involve discussion and co-operation with other Colleges to ensure that as many good applicants as possible are re-interviewed.

If you receive information that a College cannot offer you a place and has pooled your application, it is understandable that you may feel some initial disappointment. However, you have actually done well, since your application is still under consideration. Colleges seeking further applicants in your subject will have the opportunity to scrutinise your application in the second round. There is nothing that you, your teachers/advisers, or your parents should be doing in this period, and it is certainly not necessary or helpful to make direct contact with any College.

If another College wishes to re-interview you, you will be contacted early in January (probably by telephone) and invited by that College to return for further interviews.  It is a good idea to find out something about the College that is going to interview you: look at their web pages or check their entry in the Cambridge Undergraduate Prospectus. More information about preparing for interviews can be found on our website including our new Interviews in Action.  You may telephone the College Admissions Office for advice or, of course, ask questions at your interview. Colleges understand that you have had little time to prepare for this second interview. Some pooled applicants may be made an offer by an alternative College without further interview.

If you have not heard from any College by the time the interviews are taking place, the likelihood is that your application is not going to be taken further by any other College. In this case, your application papers will be returned to the College which handled your application in the first place and you will received a letter from that College by the end of January (and, in due course, from UCAS) about the final outcome of your Cambridge application. A small number of pooled applicants may, at this stage, receive an offer from the College that interviewed them in December.

It is important to realise that there may be many very good applicants in the Pool who do not get the offer of a Cambridge place. We are constrained both by numbers and also by the size of Colleges and University Departments, and cannot take all those who have the ability to do well at the University.

If you are successful in gaining a place through the Pool, you should in no way feel that you are somehow “less good” than those obtaining places in the first round. Experience shows that those taken from the Pool do equally well academically when compared with those coming to the College that considered them at the first stage, and it is almost certain that the College which accepts you will, in no time at all, become your preferred College.

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