What GSCE Grades Are Needed for Oxford & Cambridge?

Which GCSEs Should I Pick for the Best Chance at Oxbridge?

If you’re in year 8 or 9 the likelihood is that you’ll have started thinking about which GCSEs to pick ahead of your all important first round of public examinations. Whilst it’s entirely acceptable not to have thought about university at this stage, we are quite frequently asked whether GCSE choices impact your likelihood of a place at Oxford or Cambridge university. This blog outlines our main thoughts and advice on picking GCSEs so that you can achieve the best grades and hopefully in a few years’ time make a competitive application to top UK universities such as the Oxbridge colleges.

Are certain subjects better than others?

Now, the first myth to bust here is that no courses at Oxford and Cambridge have specific requirements on which GCSE subjects you might need, so it’s not quite as easy as saying you strictly need to take a certain subject to get into the courses you might want to study. Plenty of students at this stage may have a certain area of their studies that they prefer (e.g., sciences, languages, humanities, etc.) without being certain what specific subject or course they are likely to be aiming for in several years’ time, and universities do tend to bear this in mind when looking at the GCSE choices of applicants. This being said, it is of course worth remembering that the subjects you pick at GCSE need to enable you to study the required A-levels or equivalent in 2 or 3 years’ time, and university courses do tend to have strict requirements on those, particularly if you are looking to go into hard sciences such as physics or maths/engineering. For this reason, perhaps your best indicator of which subjects to do is to look up some university websites of courses you are interested in and see which A-Level subjects they require of applicants; if there are GCSEs available to you in the same or adjacent subjects then we recommend picking those! Even if universities don’t look at the specific GCSE subjects, having the training in the principles of these subjects will help you as you advance through your future studies and into university courses in related fields.

With this being said, however, there is sometimes a tendency for more established universities such as Oxford or Cambridge to look for equally ‘established’ GCSE subjects. What we mean by this is that, unless there’s a specific subject that you particularly want to study, you’re best off selecting more ‘traditional’ general academic subjects, such as French or History, rather than specific or career based subjects, such as Law or Sociology, when selecting your GCSEs. This is because these more general subjects are considered enabling subjects, proving to universities that you’ve learned a wide range of basic skills and traditional methodologies that will help you in your further studies.