The day after early admission applications close, ratio tables circulate. Every year students give up on applying after seeing figures like 40 to 1 or 60 to 1. But in essay tracks that number tells you almost nothing about the real intensity of the competition.

Why essay tracks in particular have high ratios

Essay tracks have a low threshold to apply. The weight on the school record is comparatively small, and they are seen as a route open to students whose internal grades are a disadvantage. So speculative applications pile in.

Early admission allows up to six applications, so it is normal to use one or two of them as reaches — and those reach cards often go to essay tracks. That is why nominal ratios rise.

The two stages at which the ratio collapses

The applicant pool is filtered twice.

1. No-shows — some applicants do not turn up on the day, having decided to focus on regular admission or because the date clashed with another university's exam.
2. Failing the CSAT minimum — this is where the largest fall occurs. In a track with a minimum attached, an applicant who does not clear it is rejected however well they write.

Published cases give a sense of the scale. One university's essay unit had a nominal ratio of 70.93 to 1, but recalculated on the number who met the CSAT minimum it was 20.73 to 1. Another went from a nominal 47.39 to 1 to an effective 24.18 to 1, a fall of about 44 per cent.

In other words, it is not unusual for fewer than half the number printed in the table to be the people actually competing.

So the criterion changes

The question to ask when considering an essay application is not "what is the ratio".

• Does this track have a CSAT minimum? — if it does, the effective ratio falls sharply. If not, it stays close to nominal.
• Do I clear that minimum reliably? — if you do, a high nominal ratio is actually a condition in your favour, because applicants who cannot clear it remove themselves.
• Is it an essay track with no minimum? — then every applicant is a competitor. A track with no minimum may look easier while being harder in practice.
• Do the exam dates clash? — you cannot sit two universities' essay papers on the same day. The arrangement is itself a strategy.

Material you can check

Universities publish the previous year's admissions results, and a growing number publish applicant numbers, the number meeting the minimum and the effective ratio together. Reading Adiga, the admissions portal, alongside each admissions office's results data shows how large the gap between nominal and effective is at that particular university.

How early admission tracks assess the school record is covered separately in Early Admission. It is useful when arranging essay and record-based applications together.

In summary

An essay track's ratio table is the number of people who applied, not the number of people competing. Where a CSAT minimum applies, the real field shrinks substantially. So change the order: before being frightened by the ratio, work out first whether you can clear that minimum.