A-level requirements by STEM programme

Requirements by programme

One row per canonical programme. “Required” is what the entry requirements state as compulsory; “recommended” is what they name as useful or preferred without demanding it. Where a requirement is written as a choice – Physics or Biology – both subjects are listed.

Table 1. 31 programmes, grouped by cluster. Source column: verified means the row was read off the live admissions page linked beside it; not offered means no UK university in the ARWU top 100 teaches that degree, so there is no A-level requirement to record.

How often each subject is asked for

The 23 verified rows counted by subject; the 8 not taught in the UK are left out, because a degree with no A-level requirement cannot be counted for or against one. A subject named as one of several alternatives counts as a mention for each of them – that is how the totals below are built, and it is why the columns do not add up to 23 if you count programmes instead of mentions. Four programmes name a subject both as an alternative requirement and as a recommendation, and it counts in both columns. “Compulsory” in the TL;DR means the subject stands in a slot of its own, with no alternative; the one judgement call is Manchester’s “A* in Mathematics or Further Mathematics”, counted as Mathematics compulsory because Further Mathematics A-level is not taken without Mathematics A-level – the page fixes where the A* goes, not whether Mathematics is there.

Table 2. Ten subjects, most mentioned first.

How it was collected

The programme list is the same 31 canonical names as the programme coverage dataset. For each, entry requirements were read off the admissions page of a UK university that teaches it – the one linked in the last column – because A-levels are a UK qualification and UK pages state required subjects explicitly, which most other systems do not. The search covered the eight UK universities in the ARWU top 100: Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Imperial, Edinburgh, Manchester, King’s College London and Bristol. Eight of the 31 names have no undergraduate degree at any of them – some are taught only at master’s level, some name a department or a specialism rather than a degree – and those rows record that instead of a requirement.

Limitations

Three, and they matter in this order. The sample is UK-only and single-university per programme: a different university would give a different typical offer, and often a different recommended list – Physics is A*AA at Oxford and A*A*A at Imperial. Eight of the 31 programmes drop out for having no UK undergraduate degree, so the counts are out of 23, not 31, and they are not comparable with a global programme count; one of the 23, Manchester’s Actuarial Science, is counted as Mathematics compulsory by a stated rule rather than by the page’s own words (see the note above table 2). The rows are not all from the same admission cycle: they were read in September 2026, and where a university publishes one page per cycle most rows are the 2026 page while two are 2027. Cycles differ – UCL Chemical Engineering lists Further Mathematics among its preferred subjects for 2026 entry and drops it for 2027 – so every count and every typical offer here is accurate to the page linked beside its row, and is a snapshot rather than a rule that holds across years. What the table is good for is the shape of the answer, which subject is load-bearing and which is optional; what it is not good for is planning an application to a named university.

Cite this
Atamanova, M. (2026). A-level requirements by STEM programme [Data set]. mariascales.com. https://mariascales.com/research/long-bet/data/a-levels/