Cambridge Academic English
Raelene Heersink
Each College is autonomous and selects its own students, subject to University regulations, and most admit both undergraduate and postgraduate students. College representatives sit on the University Council and Finance Committee.
There are six Schools, each of which constitutes an administrative grouping of Faculties and other institutions. They are: Arts and Humanities, Biological Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Technology.
The organisation also gives vital support to teachers and schools globally, shaping curricula and education systems, and its range of research-based admissions tests connect universities, governments and employers to applicants around the world.
The University's Institute of Continuing Education was founded in 1873 and provides accessible, flexible and high-quality education to adults throughout their lives. It offers over 250 courses covering a variety of academic disciplines and subject areas in a wide range of formats. The Institute's aim is to form supportive communities of learning where expert teachers and adult students work together as peers to achieve personal and collective educational goals, be it as a first step in higher education or progressing to mid-career postgraduate studies.
Postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge is intense and very intellectually demanding, so the University has high academic entry requirements. You are normally expected to hold or to have achieved by the start of your course:
This is a minimum requirement and meeting it is not in itself sufficient to gain a place. Entry to our courses is very competitive and we are unable to make offers to many candidates who meet the academic minimum.
If you believe your academic performance is or has been negatively affected by your circumstances, for example ill health, it is important that you use the exam mitigation process at your current university. If you wish to draw our attention to any factors, you should do this within your application.
Further information on fees, other costs and funding can be found in our Finance pages. If you are made a conditional offer of admission, you will then need to confirm that you are able to meet your fees and living costs for the length of your course. However, if you do already have funding for your study in place, you can provide details of this with your application.
All applicants who are made a formal offer of admission will receive an offer of College membership. The University of Cambridge is a collegiate university, and all its students are required to be members of a College.
All applicants are required to meet a minimum English language requirement before you are admitted to your proposed course of study. For more details check the Competence in English section of the website.
Below provides equivalence guidelines of the University's minimum academic requirements for each country. You should refer to the Course Directory for the academic requirements for your specific course, as these may be higher than the University's minimum academic requirements.
For many countries, the University recognises significant variance between institutions and this may be reflected in your academic offer condition (for example, a score of 70% from one university may not be considered the same as a score of 70% from another university).
EBSCO Educational Databases is an online education resource comprising: British Education Index (BEI), ERIC, Educational Administration Abstracts, Education Abstracts and Child Development & Adolescent Studies.
JSTOR is a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive of scholarship that includes leading academic journals across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences. It includes over 2,000 academic e-journals, as well as other materials valuable for academic work, such as primary sources.
Karger Publishers is a medical and scientific publishing company serving the information needs of the scientific community with publications of high-quality content, covering all fields of medical science.
The digital Academic Verification Document can be requested in CamSIS self-service by current students and via Extended Self-Service (ESS) for alumni. Once you have requested your document it should be available within five working days. This can be used to validate your attendance and academic award.
The content of the document cannot be modified as it represents an accurate record of your course(s) at the University of Cambridge. If you believe your document contains errors please check your personal details and course registration via CamSIS/ESS account. If you need help with this or further information, please visit the Student Registry Help Centre where you can helpful articles or submit a request for additional support.
Your College or Department may be able to prepare other bespoke letters which include information not contained on the Academic Verification Document. Please contact your departmental or College administrator for information.
The Student Registry has no connection with examinations at GCSE or A-Level, and overseas examinations. These are administered by Cambridge Assessment (previously known as the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate). For information on these topics (including past exam results) please visit the Cambridge Assessment website .
The University of Cambridge is a public collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the world's third-oldest university in continuous operation. The university's founding followed the arrival of scholars who left the University of Oxford for Cambridge after a dispute with local townspeople.[8][9] The two ancient English universities, although sometimes described as rivals, share many common features and are often jointly referred to as Oxbridge.
In 1231, 22 years after its founding, the university was recognised with a royal charter, granted by King Henry III. The University of Cambridge includes 31 semi-autonomous constituent colleges and over 150 academic departments, faculties, and other institutions organised into six schools. The largest department is Cambridge University Press & Assessment, which has 1 billion of annual revenue and reaches 100 million learners.[10] All of the colleges are self-governing institutions within the university, managing their own personnel and policies, and all students are required to have a college affiliation within the university. Undergraduate teaching at Cambridge is centred on weekly small-group supervisions in the colleges with lectures, seminars, laboratory work, and occasionally further supervision provided by the central university faculties and departments.[11][12]
The university operates eight cultural and scientific museums, including the Fitzwilliam Museum and Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Cambridge's 116 libraries hold a total of approximately 16 million books, around nine million of which are in Cambridge University Library, a legal deposit library and one of the world's largest academic libraries. Cambridge alumni, academics, and affiliates have won 121 Nobel Prizes.[13] Among the university's notable alumni are 194 Olympic medal-winning athletes[14] and several historically iconic and transformational individuals in their respective fields, including Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, John Harvard, Stephen Hawking, John Maynard Keynes, John Milton, Vladimir Nabokov, Jawaharlal Nehru, Isaac Newton, Sylvia Plath, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others.
Prior to the founding of the University of Cambridge in 1209, Cambridge and the area surrounding it already had developed a scholarly and ecclesiastical reputation due largely to the intellectual reputation and academic contributions of monks from the nearby bishopric church in Ely. The founding of the University of Cambridge, however, was inspired largely by an incident at the University of Oxford during which three Oxford scholars, as an administration of justice in the death of a local Oxford-area woman, were hanged by town authorities without first consulting ecclesiastical authorities, who traditionally would be inclined to pardon scholars in such cases. But during this time, Oxford's town authorities were in conflict with King John. Fearing more violence from Oxford townsfolk, University of Oxford scholars began leaving Oxford for more hospitable cities, including Paris, Reading, and Cambridge. Enough scholars ultimately took residence in Cambridge to form, along with the many scholars already there, the nucleus for the new university's formation.[15][16][17]
By 1225, a chancellor of the university was appointed, and writs issued by King Henry III in 1231 established that rents in Cambridge were to be set secundum consuetudinem universitatis, according to the custom of the university, and established a panel of two masters and two townsmen to determine these. A letter from Pope Gregory IX two years later to the chancellor and the guild of scholars granted the new university ius non trahi extra, or the right not to be drawn out, for three years, meaning its members could not be summoned to a court outside of the diocese of Ely.[18]
After Cambridge was described as a studium generale in a letter from Pope Nicholas IV in 1290,[19] and confirmed as such by Pope John XXII's 1318 papal bull,[20] it became common for researchers from other European medieval universities to visit Cambridge to study or give lecture courses.[19]
The 31 colleges of the present-day University of Cambridge were originally an incidental feature of the university; no college within the University of Cambridge is as old as the university itself. The colleges within the university were initially endowed fellowships of scholars. There were also institutions without endowments, called hostels, which were gradually absorbed by the colleges over the centuries, and they have left some traces, including the naming of Garret Hostel Lane and Garret Hostel Bridge, a street and bridge in Cambridge.[21]
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