Bristol vs Nottingham

Bristol's published UCAT threshold for home applicants is around 2260, while Nottingham sits at approximately 1850.

That's a 410-point gap — large enough to put the two schools in completely different competitiveness tiers. An applicant scoring in the 2000-2100 band would be competitive at Nottingham but borderline at Bristol.

Contextual / widening-participation cut-offs differ — Bristol: ~1450+ /2700 (A108 Gateway / WP - lowest invited has reached as low as 1340); Nottingham: ~1700+ /2700 (A108 Foundation Year - lower threshold). Eligible applicants should weight this heavily when choosing.

Bristol requires AAA including Chemistry and Biology.

Nottingham requires AAA including Chemistry and Biology.

Both demand the same A-Level grade band, so academic prediction is unlikely to differentiate your application between them — provided you meet the required subject combination at each.

GCSE profile matters at both schools — Bristol: Mathematics at grade 7; English Language at grade 4. GCSE resit applicants welcome. Nottingham: GCSE results form part of the academic profile alongside A-Level predictions. Maths and English at minimum grade 6 typically expected.

Both Bristol and Nottingham use MMI interviews, so the underlying prep approach is the same — practise ethics frameworks, NHS hot-topic answers and (for MMI) structured station responses against a timer.

Interview windows: Bristol interviews in December - February; Nottingham in December - March.

Bristol runs a Spiral curriculum; Nottingham runs a Integrated curriculum. The teaching philosophies are different — Bristol delivers more didactic lectures with structured systems-based progression, while Nottingham uses a more traditional lecture-led structure.

Specifics: Five-year MB ChB spiral curriculum - concepts revisited with increasing complexity. Clinical exposure from Year 1. Five-year MBChB with compulsory intercalated BMedSci built into the course (one of few UK schools to embed BMedSci as standard).

Intake size: Bristol — ~220 home + ~30 international places per year (A100 Standard Entry Medicine).; Nottingham — ~250 home + ~30 international places per year.. A larger cohort means more peer breadth; a smaller cohort means more tutor contact.

Bristol: Total: 650/968 = 67% (2024); A108 Gateway to Medicine: 63/88 = 72%. Nottingham: All Students (2024): 519/913 = 57% (or 336/911 = 37% from another source); A108 WP Foundation Year: 61/188 = 32%.

Post-interview odds give you the clearest signal of how competitive each school is at the final stage — a school with a 60% post-interview success rate is structurally easier to convert than one at 25%, even if the interview thresholds look identical on paper.

Bristol: Russell Group university with strong medical and dental programmes. Shortlisting is wholly UCAT-based - neither personal statement nor SJT is used in selection. Bristol has the highest UCAT cut-off of the major English schools.

Nottingham: Scoring system is now distinct from Lincoln's, weighting GCSE (/32), UCAT (/40) and SJT (/10) - band 4 SJT auto-rejected. No use of predicted A-level grades.