University admissions is fast becoming the new 11-plus. Such was the emotion aroused by this test that for years politicians have not been able to think straight about how to allow for differences in ability in secondary education. Their various attempts to work round the elephant in the room have left us with a very uneven, muddled school system that develops young people to different extents and creates problems for university admissions.

Selection at 11 was about identifying the top 25% for grammar schools. Selection at 18 is now about identifying the top half for universities. If all universities were equivalent this would not be a sharp issue, but as The Sunday Times University Guide clearly brings out there are huge differences not only between but within the institutions.

The task, therefore, becomes one of deciding not who gets to go to university at all, but who out of 1,700 applicants gets one of the coveted 60 places to read English at a leading university.

The pressure on university admissions and the main selection qualification, A-levels, has become intense. A-levels, in fact, derive directly from university entrance examinations.

Fifty years ago, application was made to individual universities which set their own examinations. A-levels at first played a minor role, but gradually over the years the universities gave up their own in favour of the national examination. (Oxford was the last to let go, in 1995.) As the university system has expanded and more and more people have wanted to go on to higher education, competition has driven up performance.

So many students are now getting a clutch of top grades that universities are finding it difficult to tell them apart.

It would be hard enough if the universities were dealing with actual results, but offers are made on schools’ projections. People who do better than expected are missing out to those who just scrape through on their conditional offers.

There have been proposals to switch to a system of post-qualification applications, but this has foundered on timing. Either the exams would have to be moved forward or university start dates put back. And could society cope with several hundred thousand footloose and fancy-free teenagers for three months or more?

From next year, a grade above A, the A*, is to be introduced at A-level. If this is to be awarded on tougher questions rather than dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s, it should enable the universities to identify outstanding candidates.

But few, apart from Cambridge, seem willing to take it into account. In part this is natural caution, but it is also the fear that the increased differentiation would make it even harder to comply with the government’s urgings to balance up intakes by school type, postcode and parental occupation.

As a long-term objective, the government seems to be flirting with the idea of replacing A-levels with an internally assessed project-based diploma. This certainly would not reveal any embarrassing ability differences, but by the same token would of course be less useful in telling applicants apart.

Some schools are themselves opting out of A-levels for examinations such as the international baccalaureate and the Cambridge pre-U, which they feel are a better fit with the education they wish to provide.

Is it any surprise, then, that the universities are increasingly returning to their own entrance tests? At the last count 14 universities had gone back to setting entrance tests in popular subjects such as medicine, law, English and history. Unless we sort out what type of national examination we want at the age of 18, we could come full circle with university entrance exams pre-eminent once more.

University admissions are highly devolved and each department decides whom to take. Those swamped with applications are having to find ways of getting the pool down to manageable proportions. To the consternation of applicants, this can appear idiosyncratic. Beyond existing qualifications and predicted grades, there can be rules of thumb such as on the minimum number of A*s at GCSE. In some cases personal statements are the key but in others they are ignored, and departments may formally or informally take into account school and social background.

Even if there were a perfect measure, the task still would not be straightforward. Some would argue, as they do with the American scholastic aptitude test, that it would be unfair to offer the places to those scoring highest, because some students would have been better prepared, and there has to be compensation for those coming from poorer schools or poorer homes.

There are others who would not like the outcome of the test. Even a casual glance at the make-up of the Olympic finals shows that abilities are not distributed uniformly across human groups. It is likely that among the top performers in any subject there would be an uneven spread with regard to sex, ethnicity and parental education.

And there would be those who would argue that different groups should be admitted on different scores to bring about a better social mix.

University admissions are emotive because, like the 11-plus, they are highly competitive and the outcome can have a huge bearing on future lives.

If applicants cannot be genuinely told apart, logically the fairest way of allocating places is to randomly select from among those with the desired qualifications. This works well in medical schools in the Netherlands. But if admission by lottery is unacceptable, then present processes must be made to work better.

Ofqual, the qualifications watchdog, must ensure that A-levels do distinguish clearly. The government should back off from demanding that extraneous social characteristics be taken into account. And universities have to do more to reach out and fully inform would-be students.

Selection at age 11 may have been too early, but selection at 18 is inevitable, since not everyone can do everything. It is important that the emotion currently swirling around university admissions be harnessed to make the selection process as rigorous, fair and transparent as possible, and not be allowed to hamstring us as the controversy over the 11-plus has done.

Professor Alan Smithers is director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham

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