Admissions staff at the world famous Alma Mater College are preparing for this year's gruelling round of admissions interviews in which carefully preselected candidates from diverse/disadvantaged backgrounds and with a plausible explanation for why they are “not very good at exams” will be given the opportunity to justify the College’s decision to have pre-admitted them.
Templates against which candidates are to be box-checked were circulated some time ago and the College is confident that all its admissions tutors are properly trained to help candidates respond correctly as well as to recognise and reward any perceived ability to game the system together with any other characteristic which will help the College achieve a properly diverse and inclusive profile.
Asked if the process was “fair”, Admission Office spokesperson Des Krimin-Ayshon said: “Of course it is. It’s fairly biased, fairly crude, fairly bent and fairly awful”. Further quizzed as to whether there was a covert “agenda” aimed at social engineering in play, he added: “Absolutely not, everyone knows what we are up to - it's plain as day - and, as everyone knows, the whole matter is subject to a WANDA [Widely Approved Non-disclosure Agreement]. How else do you think we’ve reached this sorry state*”.
* Later amended to "fine-tuned methodology".
As a further precaution against admitting “the wrong sort of student” the College's Governing Body agreed earlier this year that only candidates who had been invited to attend College Open Days would be eligible to apply for a place. “Since we carefully screen Open Day invitees by postcode/gender/race/ethnicity/religious affiliation and GCSE underperformance we can do some very useful filtering long before we reach the interview/confirmation stage".
Underlining the institution’s further commitment to making interviews safe spaces for those at risk [of not getting in], all will take place over Zoom/Teams or the Threadbone Corporation’s patented Spye platforms. “This will ensure that all preselected candidates have access to other helpful resources (Google, family friends, substitute interviewees etc) during their non-threatening online encounter, thus maximising their chance of impressing their interviewers and later sharing/crediting their inevitable success with/to others. Interviewers have also been encourage to dress down and if possible wear festive pajamas whilst avoiding stereotyped or strongly gendered personas".
The scheme will be subject to careful monitoring and will be evaluated once all of the students have graduated with First Class degrees in 2027/8.
Those leaked* Criteria/Questions in full:
