Shocking Stats Reveal Gender, Race and Disability Disadvantages At Finals

As exam season and the High Street’s exam halls loom ever closer, students all over Oxford are focusing their minds on how to survive finals.

However, data released by the university has revealed that three key factors hold sway over a student’s exam success, long before they ever enter an exam hall.

Shockingly, the university has revealed that race, gender and disability are strong mitigating factors over which results a student achieves.

Racial divide at finals

Final Honour Schools statistics from last year’s exam results revealed that white students were almost twice as likely to achieve a first as their Black or Chinese fellow students.

The shocking stats revealed that whilst 32% of all white students get a first, just 16% of Chinese and 18% of Black students achieve the same success.

Racial factors also proved a major factor at the other end of the academic scale, with Chinese students three times more likely to get third class honours than any other ethnic group.

Disabled students

The shocking stats also revealed that students with disabilities perform much worse in the exams than those without.

In last year’s exams, just 22% of students with disabilities achieved a first, compared to 31% of those without a disability.

Gender Gap

The finals’ results also show a gap between the genders when it comes to how well a student performs in the exam hall.

Despite the fact that women make up 46% of the student population, they take home only 40% of all firsts. This left the remaining 60% of firsts to go to Oxford’s 54% male contingency.

A Chinese student, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Tab, “Oxford simply isn’t doing enough to get adequate support for international students studying at the university. Cultural and language barriers are often overlooked but have a lasting impact on a student’s confidence”.

A university spokesperson told the Tab, “The percentage of firsts gained by students in different ethnic groups fluctuates a great deal year by year as they are based on small numbers. We can’t conclude from a single year that there is any difference in attainment in exams for students from different ethnicities”.

He added, “there is some evidence to suggest that part of any ethnicity gap is due to differences in subjects studied”, citing the higher concentration of BME (Black Ethnic Minority Students) studying subjects in the Maths, Physical and Life Sciences division, a division of subjects in which more students receive a 2:2 or below than Humanities and Social Sciences.