Personal Statement Quality Scale

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

The TSR Personal Statement Wiki's library has over 700 example personal statements for applicants to use when writing their own personal statement. These personal statements can be used for inspiration, or as an example of how to structure your own. Of course you should not copy any content from any personal statement in the library into your own statement, since this may well be flagged by the UCAS plagiarism checker, which could risk your place at university. However, by reading through the various statements, you should hopefully gain an understanding of the common themes present in personal statements for your chosen subject and how to exploit this to your advantage when formulating ideas of your own.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare for this course or subject?

All of the personal statements were submitted by applicants, both successful and unsuccessful, and so it is not always clear which the 'best' personal statements are, that is, the personal statements you should try and aspire to rather than those where you can learn from other's mistakes. If you are trying to write your statement from scratch and have no idea what a good structure is, it is important to base your structure on a good personal statement rather than a bad one. The candidate's success is not necessarily the best indicator of whether a personal statement is good or not, since not all universities give significant weighting to the personal statement and obviously the personal statement isn't the only thing considered by admissions tutors. The Personal Statement Quality Scale has been created in order to give applicants a quick and easy way to see if a particular personal statement is any good. As the quality of personal statements is usually very subjective, the rating is done by members of TSR's PS Help team, who have considerable experience in reviewing personal statements.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

All statements, no matter their rating, are useful to you when writing your own statement. Only by seeing a whole range of statements with different qualities, some satisfactory, some excellent and some not so good, can you begin to develop a picture in your own mind of what your personal statement needs to be. You should use red rated statements to see the common mistakes present in personal statements; make sure you don't include any errors like this in yours. You should use green rated statements to understand what a good structure looks like, and try and mirror this structure in your own statement. Yellow statements are also useful, they are usually average statements that contain good content, but which lack refinement. It is also useful to compare statements that are rated differently as by contrasting two different qualities, you can come to appreciate the subtle differences between a 'good statement' and a 'bad statement'.

The Personal Statement Quality Scale provides an overall rating of the quality of a statement for a large number of the personal statements in the library. However, it will not tell you in which areas the statement is good or bad. To compliment the quality scale, many statements have also been provided with a thorough review by an experienced TSR PS Helper, which will highlight the areas in which the statements are strong in addition to the areas for improvement. These more extensively reviewed statements can be found here: http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/wiki/Category:Reviewed_Personal_Statements.

The bar at the top of personal statements aims to give a clear, quick indicator of the quality of the personal statement, as judged by TSR's PS Help team. We use traffic lights: green, yellow and red, to try and establish an objective way of displaying the quality of personal statements on display. Even though a personal statement is rated as "red," this does not mean it is not useful, you need these personal statements to make sure you understand common mistakes so you can avoid them in your own personal statement.

Different universities have different, individual policies on how they use personal statements in their admissions process. Some may use the personal statement significantly while others may not use it at all. You need to bear in mind that the person with the personal statement rated yellow may have applied to universities which don't look at the personal statement, or only use it superficially during their admissions process and that is why they have been given offers with a less-than-perfect statement.

It is also possible that an average personal statement can be made up for by excelling in other areas, such as at interview. These pages only include the personal statements, not information on the candidate's application, so all these statements are reviewed on their own merits. While admissions policies may try and balance the statement against other parts of an application, the statements in the TSR Personal Statement library are reviewed purely for what they are, in isolation. Along the same lines, it is also a possibility that a statement rated red has achieved an offer and that a statement rated green did not achieve any. This is down to the multi-faceted approach that many universities take for selecting applicants.

Some courses (mostly vocational subjects such as medicine, dentistry and teaching) have particular requirements that differ from statements for other subjects. In particular, statements for these subjects need more focus on the work experience applicants have gained and the applicant's reflections on this experience and any skills they have to make them a good candidate for the course and career. This means that these areas will be considered more important when deciding on the rating that a personal statement has.

All reviews are done by members of the TSR Personal Statement Help Team who have significant experience in spotting common errors and mistakes in personal statements. Although their judgements on personal statements are usually pretty spot-on, please be aware that rating personal statements is a very, very subjective business and our rating on a statement may not necessarily be the same rating an admissions tutor at a particular university would give. Please take the ratings as more an indicator of the quality of the personal statement, rather than an absolute declaration. If you are the original author of any of these personal statements and no longer wish it to be listed within this library to help other applicants, please contact either F1 fanatic or Tom, who will remove it for you immediately.

How personal statements have changed?

The current personal statement format, with three 'scaffolding' questions, was introduced by Ucas in September 2025. This personal statement was submitted before then, using the old essay-style format. It has been carefully edited into the three-question format, with all of the original wording kept.

Need help with your personal statement? You can ask a question or get feedback from The Student Room community (and our trained personal statement experts) on the personal statement advice forum.