Many toil for months, writing draft after draft with care and attention. Some simply cut and paste somebody else’s work from the internet. Others order tailor-made versions online for as little as £24.99.

However they do it, writing a personal statement extolling their virtues and love of study has become a rite of passage for teenagers applying to university.

Now it turns out that many of them need not have bothered.

The University of Cambridge has admitted that it pays no attention to applicants’ personal statements when deciding whom to interview or offer a place.

“With the profusion of companies and websites offering to help draft applicants’ personal statements for a fee, no admissions tutor believes them to be the sole work of the applicant any more,” said Geoff Parks, the university’s straight-talking director of admissions. Much simpler just to ignore them.

“We certainly don’t assign any marks to personal statements,” he added. “I have been told by students after they have been admitted that their schools write the personal statements. Reading a very good personal statement doesn’t tell you anything about the student because you cannot be sure that it’s the work of the person concerned.”

Although the university may use the personal statement as the basis for discussion during an interview, it is not used to judge the student. At all.

Personal references from teachers are also treated with a huge pinch of salt. Now that students can ask to see their references, teachers have stopped saying anything interesting or controversial, Mr Parks suggests.

Instead, Cambridge admissions tutors will use GCSE grades, AS level scores and predicted grades as their main forms of assessment. All those hours that applicants have spent trying to distinguish themselves by doing Duke of Edinburgh awards, ploughing through Ulysses or helping out in the local care home might just as well have been spent watching South Park.

Cambridge is right to be wary of applicants who claim to have read all of Thomas Hardy’s work or to spend every Saturday dissecting rodents in the garden shed.

A survey of 50,000 university applications two years ago — many of them for places on medical sciences courses and at Oxbridge — found that a significant minority of students had plagiarised them from the internet. The giveaway was the 234 applicants who all began their medical school application with the same anecdote about setting fire to their pyjamas at the age of eight.

Even so, Cambridge’s decision to ignore the personal statement is a radical one. As pretty much all Oxbridge applicants are straight A students, telling them apart can be difficult. The personal statement is the one part of the process that is designed to shed light on them as individuals.

The fact that it has not been open about ignoring personal statements is of concern too. Anna Fazackerley, of the think-tank Policy Exchange, said: “Many applicants spend days agonising over their personal statements, and it seems unfair that their efforts are completely ignored. Universities need to be transparent with people about what counts in admissions. The whole process is worryingly opaque.”

It is a different story at Oxford, where the head of admissions, Mike Nicholson, still regards the personal statement as a good way to distinguish the truly gifted, original and inspired students from those who are merely well-drilled.

“We know that candidates will spend a lot of time thinking about what to write in their personal statement. We find it a very helpful way to identify what they are doing above and beyond their A-level studies.”

Of course, students applying to Cambridge will also be applying to other universities. And these institutions, particularly those that do not interview candidates, will take personal statements into account.

Interestingly, the university admissions service UCAS has been exploring the idea of allowing students to write different personal statements for each of the five courses they apply for rather than submit a single catch-all version, as they do at present.

There may be a lot of merit in this — although it could just result in more business for the cut-and-paste versions from the internet.

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