The pleasures of lying - Cambridge Statistics

Instead of anything interesting (articles of such despicable nature will eventually make their way into this blog, when I finish the projects surrounding them), I thought I'd hash up some crude stats of the Cambridge application system. The important bits are coloured, so you don't have the trawl through crap to get them.

Numbers used to generated stats available here. Working out kept in so people can smugly point out I made some ridiculous error in the calculations...

Whole University

Applicants: (13673 + 14668 + 14343 + 14054) / 4 = 14184.5 (call it 14185)
Offers: (4140 + 4161 + 3997 + 3970) / 4 = 4067 (includes winter poll)

Let's crudely spread the number of rejected applicants out by the number of minutes in a year, to give a completely false but amusing statistic of, on average, how many minutes would go by before someone got rejected, if they were all evenly spread throughout the year.

Wikipedia: 1 year = 365 days = 8760 hours = 525600 minutes = 31536000 seconds

But we're going to go off a solar year, which is, according to Google Calculator, 525948.766 minutes, but this time we'll round down to 525948 minutes. Also 8765.81277 (call it 8766 hours), again according to Google Calculator.

4067 / 14184.5 * 100 = 28.672142 so 28.7% of applications receive offers.

--DIVERSION--
For 2002-2004 (2005 admissions figure is currently unavailable):
Applicants: (13673 + 14668 + 14343) / 3 = 14228 (low in 2005 eh?)
Offers: (4140 + 4161 + 3997) / 3 = 4099.33 (call it 4099)
Admissions: (3437 + 3309 + 3378) / 3 = 3374.67 (call it 3375)

Looking at Offers vs Admissions, this means 17.6% (just above VAT) of
applicants who received an offer either failed to make the grade, or just plain
snubbed Cambridge.

Rejected: 14185 - 4067 = 10118

So... 525948 / 10118 = 51.981419 (call it 52)
in hours 8766 / 10118 = 0.866377 (call it 0.87).

Also note, if we went off Wikipedia's stats, it'd give us 51.947025 minutes, which is still just 52 minutes in terms of the accuracy we really need. So there you have it, it's every 52 minutes.

Bonus material (smaller sections)

As above, but limited to "Computer Science" 2002->2005...

Applications: (418 + 310 + 266 + 230) / 4 = 306 (wow applications plummeting anually?)
Offers: (127 + 111 + 91 + 85) / 4 = 103.5 (call it 104, although this gratuitous rounding could give false hope!)

103.5 / 306 * 100 = 33.823529 (call it 34)

So 34% of applicants get offers for Computer Science, which is 4.3% higher than the university average!

This time, let's limit it to Peterhouse 2002->2005...

Applicants: (337 + 349 + 302 + 316) / 4 = 326
Offers: (97 + 97 + 83 + 95) / 4 = 93

93 / 326 * 100 = 28.527607 (call it 28.5)

So 28.5% of applicants get offers from Peterhouse, which is 0.2% below the university average!

Conclusion

On average, 28.7% of applications get an offer from Cambridge university. This is equivalent to 1 person being rejected from Cambridge every 0.87 hours (52 minutes). Of the lucky candidates to receive these offers, 17.6% of them either fail to get the required grades, or snub the university (or possibly have terminal cancer, like that's an excuse).

For Computer Science, 34% of applicants get offers (4.3% higher than university average).
For Peterhouse, 28.5% of applicants get offers (0.2% below the university average).

Epilogue

Of course, the pedantic would point out the averages could possibly have been done a little better; there's a loss of accuracy, and that I can't really generalise the 17.6% figure to the 4 year sample as I stated myself I used a 3 year sample to obtain that figure. But whatever, it's an approximation. Also, yes yes, the CompSci figures are declining every year, and so it could be technically more accurate to only take the last year or two as the sample, assuming the decline continues at the present rate; but as I'm not going to look into the reasons for the decline, I'm not going to make that assumption.