University admissions in the UK: admissions formulae

I recently wrote about University admissions in the UK , from the point of view of the centralized process by which applications are made, university decisions are communicated, and student responses are collected. Universities' admissions decisions are decentralized, however; each university makes its own. A story in the Times of London, with accompanying links to documents obtained through Britain's Freedom of Information Act, gives an unusually detailed look at how top universities are making those decisions: Top schools boycott ‘biased’ Durham--The leading university's entry system handicaps high performers.

The article discusses first Durham University, and then Cambridge and Oxford. Some controversy attaches to these universities' weighted ranking systems that now give extra points to students who come from low achieving schools.