Revealed: These are officially the trickiest Oxbridge courses to get a spot on in 2024

In order to get into Oxbridge, you’ve got to do four things that you don’t need for other Russell Group unis, submit your UCAS personal statement early, do an entry exam, an interview and be possibly the most insufferable person in any room.

Oxford and Cambridge might have come bottom in the most popular unis of 2024 based on applications, but probably because a lot of people can’t actually be arsed with the whole faff of the application process. And well, because it’s also massively difficult.

This year’s UCAS 2023 end-of-cycle data tell us how many people applied to study for each course at Oxford and Cambridge, and just how few of them were accepted. From this, we can work out the hardest subjects to get into at Oxbridge in 2024.

The easiest subject to get into is art and design at Cambridge, which has a 35.71 per cent acceptance rate. Only 140 people applied for the course and 50 were accepted. This is followed by languages also at Cambridge which has an acceptance rate of 29.89 per cent. 1,815 people applied to study languages at Cambridge and 530 of them were accepted.

But officially the hardest Oxbridge subject to get into is business management at Oxford which only has a 5.19 per cent acceptance rate. This means that of the 1,585 people who applied for the course, only 120 of them were accepted. Another Oxford course also takes up the second hardest spot and that’s computing at Oxford which has a 6.91 per cent acceptance rate, just 0.66 per cent lower than the same course at Cambridge.

So these are officially the hardest subjects to get into at Oxbridge in 2024:

20. History, philosophy and religion at Oxford – 18.68 per cent acceptance rate.

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19. Geography at Cambridge – 18.42 per cent acceptance rate.

18. Education at Cambridge – 17.95 per cent acceptance rate.

17. Maths at Cambridge – 15.94 per cent acceptance rate.

16. Engineering and technology at Cambridge – 15.31 per cent acceptance rate.

15. Engineering and technology at Oxford – 15 per cent acceptance rate,

14. Medicine and dentistry at Cambridge – 13.42 per cent acceptance rate,

13. Law at Cambridge – 13.7 per cent acceptance rate.

12. Physical sciences at Oxford – 13.6 per cent acceptance rate.

11. Biological sciences at Oxford – 12.64 per cent acceptance rate.

10. Social sciences at Cambridge – 12.13 per cent acceptance rate.

9. Psychology at Oxford – 11.4 per cent acceptance rate.

8. Architecture and planning at Cambridge – 10.81 per cent acceptance rate.

7. Social sciences at Oxford – 9.9 per cent acceptance rate.

6. Medicine and dentistry at Oxford – 8.97 per cent acceptance rate.

5. Law at Oxford – 8.92 per cent acceptance rate.

4. Psychology at Cambridge – 8.56 per cent acceptance rate.

3. Computing at Cambridge – 7.57 per cent acceptance rate.

2. Computing at Oxford – 6.91 per cent acceptance rate.

1. Business management at Oxford – 5.19 per cent acceptance rate.

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