Cambridge admissions chief rejects 'social engineering' Prof Ebdon also backed the use of "contextual data," which is often employed to make lower-grade offers to applicants from poor performing state schools - effectively compensating for inferior teaching. But in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dr Sewell rejected the approach and insisted Cambridge could not be pushed into "any artificial benchmarking." "We would be worried about admitting students who have achieved below our standard offer because the research we have done suggests that students who achieve relatively modestly... are more likely to struggle academically at Cambridge than students who have achieved better across their range of three A-level subjects," he said. We would worry that simply dropping the grades might actually be detrimental to the life chances of the person for whom we did it. We're not doing them a favour if they come here and struggle. He added: "Prior attainment and past experience in examinations are good predictors of how you will continue to do. It is an exams heavy course. At the end of each year, high stakes assessment takes place [and] someone who has done consistently well across their best three subjects... is giving us a signal that they are the sort of person who is suited to the assessment regime at the university. All universities are now required to draw up an "access agreement" setting out targets designed to boost the proportion of pupils admitted from disadvantaged backgrounds in return for charging up to £9,000 in tuition fees. In its agreement, Cambridge says it will attempt to award 62 per cent of places to state-educated pupils by 2016, compared with just under six-in-10 currently. But Dr Sewell suggested that privately-educated pupils were always likely to be over-represented as they often attended academically-selective schools. "We shouldn't necessarily expect that the whole population in 11-to-16 or even in 16-to-18 education should be exactly mirrored in terms of the admissions to selective universities because we are not comparing two identically qualified cohorts," he said. Speaking last month, David Willetts, the Universities Minister, called on all selective institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge to expand and admit more students. But Dr Sewell suggested the move may damage academic standards. "A significant expansion of the student body isn't just a question of cramming more people into a lecture theatre," he said. We don't want to imperil all that in a dash for growth. If the student experience is detrimentally affected, then simply saying more students should come isn't necessarily helpful.