A quick note before I get into this: every example below is invented for teaching purposes. None of it is based on, adapted from, or resembles any statement I’ve actually reviewed. I’ve written these from scratch to illustrate specific points, and you shouldn’t recognise anyone in them, because there’s no one to recognise. If you’re looking for real statements to copy from, don’t. UCAS runs similarity checks, tutors read hundreds of these a year and can smell a template from a mile off, and the whole point of this exercise is finding your own specific material, not borrowing someone else’s.

What I can do is show you the shape of a strong answer versus a weak one, using the same underlying idea each time, so you can see exactly what changes.

Example 1: A Q1 answer (“Why do you want to study this course or subject?”)

Weak version:

“I have always been fascinated by economics and how it affects everything from politics to everyday life. Studying subjects like Maths and Business at school has shown me how numbers and real-world decisions connect, and I believe university is the perfect place to develop these interests further. I am excited by the idea of studying a course that combines analytical thinking with an understanding of society.”

Why it doesn’t work: every sentence in this paragraph could be lifted out and dropped into a different applicant’s statement without anyone noticing. “Always been fascinated,” “affects everything,” “the perfect place to develop these interests”: none of it is falsifiable, and none of it tells the tutor anything specific about this student. It also spends a sentence restating that they study Maths and Business, which is already sitting on the application elsewhere. There’s no niche here, no origin story, and nothing forward-looking about what they actually want to study at degree level.

Stronger version:

“When my local council raised parking charges to fund bus subsidies, half my street signed a petition against it, even the households without cars, who benefited from the subsidy and paid nothing towards it. That contradiction is what pulled me into public economics: people don’t always object to a policy because it costs them, but because they can see the cost and not the benefit. I want to study economics at degree level to get properly underneath problems like this, not just note that people respond to incentives, but work through why the same incentive structure produces such different reactions depending on how visible the cost is.”

Why it works: it opens on something small, local and specific (a council decision the student actually witnessed) rather than an abstract claim of lifelong fascination. It draws out an economic tension (visible cost vs. diffuse benefit) rather than just describing the event. And it ends by pointing forward to what they want from the course, not just what they already know. This is a concrete personal anecdote used properly: edited for concision, not smothered in a generic “interest in economics” framing sentence first.

Example 2: A Q2 answer (“How have your qualifications and studies helped you prepare?”)

Weak version:

“Studying Maths, Economics and History at A-level has given me strong analytical and essay-writing skills. In Economics, I particularly enjoyed learning about market failure and government intervention. I also read several books on economics in my own time, including Freakonomics, which developed my interest in the subject further and improved my critical thinking skills.”

Why it doesn’t work: this is a wall of claims with no content behind any of them. “Strong analytical skills,” “developed my interest further,” “improved my critical thinking”: a tutor reading this has to take the student’s word for it, because nothing is demonstrated. Naming Freakonomics without saying a single thing from it is worse than not mentioning it at all; it reads as evidence you own the book, not evidence you engaged with an argument in it. And restating the A-level subjects wastes characters on information the tutor already has.

Stronger version:

“Reading Freakonomics for a school book club, I was struck by Levitt’s claim that legalised abortion in the 1970s explains a large share of the fall in US crime two decades later, a correlation that felt too convenient until I read the mechanism: fewer unwanted childhoods, not fewer people. I looked up the Donohue-Levitt paper afterwards and found the criticism more interesting than the original claim. Foote and Goetz later showed the state-level controls in the original regressions had an error, and the effect shrank considerably once fixed. That taught me something Economics A-level hadn’t quite landed for me yet: a clever mechanism is not the same as a robust result, and the second thing is much harder to establish than the first.”

Why it works: it names a specific claim, engages with the actual argument rather than the book’s back cover, and, crucially, follows the debate far enough to find a counter-argument and take a view on it. That’s Point → Elaboration → Analysis in full: what they read, the specific detail, and what they now think. It also demonstrates exactly the analytical scepticism that “strong analytical skills” only asserted in the weak version. (Worth flagging for your own use: if you use an example like this, go and check the papers yourself rather than take a summary on trust. The economics here has been simplified for the sake of a short illustration, and you should be able to defend every detail you put in your own answer.)

Example 3: A Q3 answer (“What else have you done outside education, and why is this relevant?”)

Weak version:

“During the summer, I completed work experience at a local accountancy firm, which was a valuable and eye-opening experience. I also volunteered at a charity shop, took part in a Model United Nations conference, and started a small stationery business on the side. These experiences have taught me the importance of hard work, teamwork and communication, all of which will help me succeed at university.”

Why it doesn’t work: four activities, zero development. It reads exactly like a CV translated into sentences: “valuable and eye-opening,” “hard work, teamwork and communication” are phrases any applicant to any course could use, for any activity. None of the four items gets far enough for the tutor to see what actually happened, and the “why is this relevant” half of the question never gets answered. The link back to economics is asserted (“will help me succeed”) rather than shown.

Stronger version:

“Running a small stationery business from home taught me more about pricing than I expected. I started by copying competitors’ prices, then noticed my sales barely moved when I raised them by 15% on my three best-selling notebooks, a rougher, real-world version of the price inelasticity I’d only met before as a downward-sloping curve on a whiteboard. When I tried the same increase on a slower-moving product, sales fell sharply. It made me want to understand why some goods behave so differently from others even within the same small shop, which is part of why I’m drawn to microeconomics specifically rather than economics in the abstract.”

Why it works: one activity, developed properly, with the “why relevant” question answered explicitly at the end rather than left implicit. It also does something the weak version doesn’t: it takes something abstract from the syllabus (an elasticity curve) and shows it being tested against a messy real-world case, which is exactly the kind of concrete link a tutor is looking for as evidence of fit. Note, too, that it doesn’t try to cram in the charity shop and the Model UN conference as well. One point, developed, beats four points gestured at. If those other activities matter, a short line naming them at the very end is fine; they don’t need their own paragraph each.

The pattern across all three

Look back at what changed in each pair. It’s the same three moves every time:

1. Specific, not generic. A council parking charge, a named book with a named claim, a stationery business with an actual price change, not “always fascinated,” “valuable experience,” “strong skills.”
2. Shown, not told. The strong versions demonstrate the thinking happening rather than asserting that thinking occurred.
3. Tied back to economics explicitly. Every strong example ends by connecting the activity to a specific economic idea or to what the student wants to study next, not left for the tutor to infer.

That’s genuinely most of what separates a forgettable answer from a memorable one. The ideas themselves don’t need to be groundbreaking. A parking charge and a stationery business are about as ordinary as raw material gets. What makes them work is the treatment.