Rejection answers

After enquiring as to why I got rejected from Manchester I got a letter this morning telling me why.

They marked my personal statement and there were 8 different topics for which they gave marks. These topics were 'reasons for choosing/changing to medicine', 'work experience and general knowledge of healthcare', 'interpretation of work experience', 'determination/conscientiousness', 'teamwork', 'interests/hobbies/sports', 'written communication skils' and 'intellectual ability'.

I was quite happy to receive a 20/20 for intellectual ability. My lowest mark was for determination and conscientiousness which did slightly surprise me because I have read my teachers' reports and almost all of them actually write that i'm conscientious and determined (I mean if I wasn't determined to do medicine would I really have gone through this whole application/interview process again to get in and done all the work experience i've done when I could have just done biomedical sciences instead).

However I realise that they have thousands of candidates and they say on the letter they get rid of over 80% of them at this stage. Its a very tough thing to have to decide just from an application who out of the thousands they should interview and I guess my application just wasn't quite good enough (in the eyes of that person who marked it). I scored 75/100 overall and the threshold for rejection was 75 and below. So I was just extremely unlucky.

It was nice of Manchester anyway to reply to my email and write to me to tell me why I was rejected.

Edit: I actually don't agree with some of the marks and am going to write an email to my housemaster to see if theres any way of getting them to reconsider my application.