Accepting an unconditional offer

You might have heard stories about unconditional offers, and how a friend-of-a-friend’s next-door neighbour’s cousin received one before they got their exam results. In the past this would probably have been an urban myth or at most, not the whole story. However, some universities are now making unconditional offers to exceptional applicants who don’t have their results yet.

Mark Newman, UCAS Adviser, explains what you need to consider if you’re thinking about accepting one of these offers, which remain relatively rare.

Mark Newman, UCAS Adviser

Having an unconditional offer from your favourite university at an early stage of your application can be very reassuring. It means that if you select them as your firm choice, you will definitely be accepted on to the course, regardless of what grades you get in the summer.

But there can be a bit of confusion about accepting unconditional offers, so before you select one as your firm choice, make sure you know the facts.

If you accept an unconditional offer as your firm choice:

1. your exam results won’t affect whether or not you get accepted but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Here’s why:

• When you apply for work placements and jobs, you will be asked about your qualifications. Often there are requirements from pre-university qualifications.
• When you start at uni you’ll be straight into assignments, coursework and for many courses, exams. The qualifications you’re studying for at the moment are essential preparation for this and are the foundations of your future studies.
• Your new course mates at uni are likely to have completed relevant qualifications before they’ve started the course, so you’d have to play catch-up from the moment you arrive if you chose not to finish your A levels or equivalent. That’s not easy when you already have so many new things to learn. 
• Sometimes things don’t go to plan. If you arrive at your chosen uni and decide it’s not right for you, you may choose to reapply for other unis or look for jobs instead. Leaving gaps where your education is concerned could have a negative impact.
    

2. you cannot have an insurance choice. Because ‘unconditional’ means you’ll definitely get a place on the course, you don’t need the option of another choice. If instead you accept a conditional offer as your firm choice then it’s OK to accept an unconditional offer as your insurance choice. That said, a university may stipulate that their offer is only unconditional if you make them your firm choice, so be sure to check any terms attached to their offer before you reply.

3. you can’t just go into Clearing to accept a different university if you decide on results day that you no longer want the place. By accepting the offer you’re entering into a commitment with the university, so it’s really important to make sure you pick your favourite choice to be your firm choice. If your insurance choice is unconditional, you also need to be prepared to be accepted by that university if you are unsuccessful with your conditional firm choice.

If you need help deciding which offer to accept as your firm choice, speak to your tutors and careers advisers. Family and friends can also offer alternative perspectives you might not have considered, and reading blogs from current students already at your university choices can provide a valuable insight into what it’s like to be part of their student community.      

Three things to do while you wait for uni decisions

Katie Collins, Social
Media Exec at UCAS

So you’ve sent your application – great! Now it’s just a case of waiting for decisions, right? One after the other they’ll pop up on Track and you’ll get those notification emails. Right... BUT don’t expect it to happen straight away. You could find that it’s several months before you hear from a university, or for the lucky few it could happen straight away. The truth is every university and college will take a different amount of time to get back to you. It’s undoubtedly an anxious time and it can seem to last forever, but I assure you it won’t. Although you don’t know exactly when you’ll get all those heart-stopping Track notification emails, you can be certain that it will either be by 7 May (if you applied before 15 January) or by 16 July (if you applied after 15 January and before 30 June).

To pass the time as you wait for decisions, you – like many others – might find yourself compelled to log in to Track day and night to check for updates. Other than causing a repetitive strain-type injury, this isn’t likely to have any impact on how you feel. So if you want to use your time more wisely, here’s what I recommend you do between now and your last uni decision:

1. Figure out the next steps. When you’ve had all your uni decisions it’ll be time to reply to your offers. You’ll want to get this right, so have a read of our advice and watch our how-to guide to find out what you’ll need to do. It’s also a good idea to prepare for the unexpected: no offers. If you end up in this situation you could use Extra to apply for another choice, so make time to find out about this option.
    
2. Get to know the universities a bit better. Most of them are eager to meet you on social media, so what are you waiting for? Make the most of the opportunity to ask them your questions and stay up-to-date with what’s going on around their campuses. It could help you when it comes to choosing which offers to accept, plus you’ll get a feel for what it’s like to be part of their student community.
    
3. Suss out student blogs. Who else can tell you what it’s really like to go to uni other than real life students? A frank and honest account of student life is the closest you can get before embarking on it for yourself. Many unis feature student bloggers on their websites and there are lots of other students out there who blog independently.

University offers: what are you waiting for?

Getting your university application into UCAS can seem like a bit of a whirlwind. From pretty much the first moment you pass through the doors of your school/college in September, you get constant reminders to crack on with your application, research your choices, draft your personal statement, redraft your personal statement, meet your tutor to discuss the redraft of your personal statement, redraft it again  - the list can seem endless. Then once you've finally had it signed off by your school and they send it on to UCAS... almost a deafening silence. Apart from your UCAS Welcome pack and a trickle of confirmation emails from universities, nothing much happens at all.

This wait for offers can be an anxious one for many. This is heightened when you can see others getting offers when you're not. The process can sometimes be perceived to move at glacial speed and it's hard to see why it's taking so long to either say 'yes' or 'no'.

To help shed some light on how the process works once your application's with a university, why it might take some time to hear back and why others getting offers before you isn't necessarily something to be worried about, our guest blogger Richard Emborg, Director of Student Recruitment & Admissions at Durham University tells us what goes on behind the scenes:

Richard Emborg

The right decision versus the quick decision

Once you’ve submitted your UCAS application you’ll naturally be anxious about when you’ll hear a decision on your choices. For some of your choices you might hear quite soon after you apply. One university prides itself on making decisions on some applications within an hour! You might not hear from others for some weeks or possibly months, depending on the date when you applied.  No university or college will intentionally make you wait for a decision longer than is necessary but all will prioritise making the right decision over a fast decision. The right decision is one where offers go to the strongest applicants who are most suitable for the programme of study from amongst those who apply by the application deadline.

Although there are no guarantees over when you will hear a decision from a particular university or college, UCAS does set a deadline that if you apply by the 15 January deadline you should hear by 31 March and will definitely hear by 9 May. So you can be sure of that much.

Why it can take some time to hear back

There are a number of reasons that affect how quickly decisions are reached on applications. These include:

• When is the deadline for applications?
• How many applications are received?
• How competitive is entry to the course?
• Is more than the UCAS application considered when making a decision; such as interviews, admissions tests or the assessment of portfolios or written pieces of work?
• Who makes the admissions decisions: an academic member of staff or an administrator?
• Does the university or college adopt a gathered field approach? This is where all or some of the decisions on applications are delayed until all on-time applications have been received and assessed. Sometimes this might also be necessary to manage numbers of undergraduate students to student number controls set externally on universities and colleges.

Typically decisions might take longer for one or more choices if one or more the following are true:

• If some of your choices are to courses with a 15 October closing date and some are to courses with a 15 January closing date.
• If there are more suitably qualified applications than there are offers available.
• If interviews, admissions tests, or assessments of portfolios or pieces of written work are required.
• If admissions decisions are made by an academic member of staff who also has teaching and/or research duties.
• If the university or college adopts a gathered field approach to making decisions or processing them to UCAS.

The waiting game

No news can be good news

Some universities and colleges will contact you when they receive your application and/or during the period that they are making a decision, to inform you on the progress of the application. Others might provide a portal for you to check yourself. Whether you receive any contact or not, the main thing to remember is keep calm and bear in mind that not hearing quickly might be a good thing.  It might be because the university or college is considering your application very carefully and seriously considering making you an offer. No news can be good news. Remember that offers can be issued throughout the admissions cycle up to any decision deadline. There’s little you can do while you wait except ensure you satisfy any requests from your university or college choices. Better to concentrate on studying hard on any qualifications you are currently taking.

Here at Durham we have a reputation for taking longer than many other universities in making our decisions. Our average time for informing an applicant of our decision is actually within three months from when we receive an application, but some applicants might have to wait longer. The reasons for this are primarily the competition for places on our programmes and, for applicants applying for Medicine, Primary Teaching or our Foundation Programmes, a requirement that applicants are interviewed before an offer is issued.

The journey your application makes

There are full details of our process on our website. In summary, your application is initially processed in the Student Recruitment and Admissions Office (SRAO), where we ensure that it is complete. Then it is passed to our academic departments where an academic admissions selector (and sometimes more than one) assesses your application and makes a decision. It is here that an interview might be held or admissions test results considered. If you apply for a joint honours degree both academic departments will assess your application. For international students our International Office makes the decisions, applying selection criteria defined by our academic departments. The decision on each application is passed to SRAO and we process it to UCAS. We then pass applications successful in receiving an offer to our colleges to be allocated amongst them. Once a college is allocated, that college will contact the applicant informing them of this.

Whilst this process might seem quite simple, with around 25,000 high quality undergraduate applications it involves hundreds of staff, some really detailed thought and consideration and lots of hard work from a team dedicated to giving applicants as good an experience as possible. Making the right admissions decisions really matters to us!

Will there still be places available by 15 January?

Students sometimes express concerns that if they apply nearer to the January deadline than to September that there will be no offers left. That’s not the case at Durham. We are committed to the principle of equal consideration so that we can make our offers to the very strongest applicants. We proactively spread our offers between October and March to best ensure that there are enough offers left for later applicants. Like all other universities and colleges we also recognise that not every offer will end up in a registered student and so we make more offers than we have places available.

One final thing: when you’ve received decisions from your choices do think carefully about your replies to any offers. Don’t rush the decision and make sure its right for you.  Oh, and if you apply to Durham, good luck in your application; we’ll be giving it a lot of care and attention.

Why can't I see any change to Track?

Have you had an email telling you Track has changed? Have you logged onto Track but can't see any changes? 

If so, it'd be best to check the choice again! A change to the status doesn't necessarily mean a decision has been made. There could have also been a change to the campus code, course code, the start date, point of entry or conditions for example. 

5 things you need to know about A Level results day!

As you can imagine there are lots of questions and comments flying around right now about A level results day and Clearing.We'll be sending out advice based on your queries in the run-up to results day, as indeed we've done for the past few weeks. We've also got a handy video to help you prepare for getting those all-important grades. However, many students often have concerns and expectations that go unnoticed because they never ask us a question about them. Fortunately we're a vigilant lot, so with all this in mind, here are 5 things you need to know about A Level results day!

1. Track doesn't go live at midnight! It'll start updating at 08:00 (UK time) on 15 August. So from that time you'll be able to check the decisions made by your university choices.

2.  The vast majority of universities will update their decisions on Track on results day... but not all of them will. We've got lots of information about this on our 'Still Waiting' page, but in a nutshell it'll usually be for one of the following reasons:

• You've narrowly missed meeting the conditions of the offer and the university are still giving your application consideration. They'll usually wait to see how other applicants for the course have done and then make a decision then.
• They've not got your exam results. If their conditions included a qualification for which we don't pass on the results then they'll need you to send them the results. Details of exam results we handle can be found here
• If you've been asked to achieve a certain grade in a GCSE, the university won't be able to confirm your place until the results for those are out on 23 August. You'd need to pass the results to them.

3. Track has had some BIG improvements since last year. All of our technology has been through thorough testing to make sure that all our attention can be focused on helping students through the Clearing process on results day.

4. We'll be sending emails to you to let you know the universities' decisions.These won't be the standard Track updates you usually get telling you that there's been a change to the status. These emails will be telling you whether or not you've got into your chosen university. 

5. You won't be able to add a Clearing choice until the afternoon on 15 August. This gives you time to research your options and make informed decisions before potentially adding a choice. Check our Clearing guidance for what to do if you're using Clearing.

UCAS points - what you need to know!

You will have only been in Year 13/S6 for a day or two at most and already your schools will be impressing upon you the importance of getting a start on your UCAS applications. For many, this will be pretty much the same theme your previous year ended with. Your initial thoughts will most likely be along the lines of "Nooooo! This is all happening too soon!"

Once that initial shock has subsided though, you start focussing on the job in hand and one of the first things that you'll start looking at is UCAS points - how many you have already, how many you need for your uni, what qualifications get points and so on. And it's here that you often see the most confusion and misunderstandings and it can sometimes be hard to know where to begin. So, I've set out a few things to consider that will hopefully help you in making the right choices on your application.

What are UCAS points?
UCAS points, or more precisely the UCAS Tariff, was designed by an expert panel to help universities when deciding on entry requirements and making offers to applicants. It allows universities to quickly compare qualifications to each other and to be able to assess applicants for their courses in a particular year. For example, a triple Distinction for a BTEC National Diploma will get 360 points as will achieving three A grades at A Level. So a university may say that you need 360 UCAS points to get on their course and they may get some people applying who took A Levels and some who took BTEC National Diplomas.

So, it's all just a case of accumulating enough points - don't grades or particular qualifications matter?
It's actually not often the case that you'll be made an offer simply asking for a set amount of points. There will normally be some stipulations which relate the relevance of a qualification to the course you are applying to. Here are three examples of how offers could be made:

• "This offer is subject to you achieving 220 UCAS Tariff points from the BTEC National Diploma qualification"

• “This offer is subject to you obtaining a minimum of 260 UCAS Tariff points from a  maximum of 3 A Levels to include A Level Physics"

• “This offer is subject to you obtaining 240 Tariff points from at least two A Levels excluding General Studies"

So you can see that although points are being asked for, there are additional requirements that universities are stating. This means that achieving certain grades from particular qualifications or subjects can be very important.

Why do universities even have to ask for UCAS points? Can't they just ask for grades?
In short, yes they can. Not many people realise that it's completely up to the university as to whether they use the Tariff. Some universities might not use it at all and may simply refer to specific qualifications and grades in their requirements. We know that there is a variety of practice in terms of how offers are made with some universities making Tariff only offers, some making Tariff and qualification offers and some just making qualification based offers.

An A* at A Level gets you 140 points. Can you honestly say that getting an A* in Film Studies is as hard as getting an A* in Physics?
The qualification regulators (Ofqual in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, CCEA for general qualifications in Northern Ireland and SQA in Scotland)  are responsible for accrediting and validating qualifications. They regulate qualifications, examinations and assessments and it’s their job to ensure that grades achieved across the individual subjects within a qualification are of the same standard.  UCAS can’t make that call.

Bear in mind though that universities will assess applications on their individual merits and relevance to the specific courses you've applied for. If you're applying for a medicine degree, for example, the fact you're studying a Physics A Level is going to carry a lot more weight than if you're taking Film Studies because it’s more relevant to the content of that degree and demonstrates your interest in a related area of study.  Also, as you can see from the previous question, universities can make UCAS points offers in combination with asking for a specific grade and/or qualification. 

How do I know if my qualifications get UCAS points?
You can check our Tariff tables to see if they're on there and how many points individual grades might get.

What happens if my qualifications aren't on the Tariff? Can I still get into uni?
There are many qualifications which don’t appear on the Tariff. This will normally be because the awarding body hasn’t asked UCAS to consider it for the Tariff or because the qualification is structured in such a way that it isn't possible to award it UCAS points. Therefore, if a qualification doesn’t receive UCAS points, this is no reflection on the quality of the qualification or its reputability.

If you’re applying for courses that only mention UCAS points in their Entry Requirements, you should speak to the university directly to discuss your qualifications.  Any qualification mentioned in your application will receive due consideration.

Should you reply to your offers by 9 May?

Many of you will need to reply to your offers on Track by 9 May. However, this won't apply to everyone and it seems to be causing some confusion. This flow chart will hopefully make things a bit clearer!

That awkward moment when you get a text message (or two!) from UCAS...

If you made your UCAS application by 15 January and you received decisions from all your university choices by 31 March then the chances are we will have texted you yesterday. In fact you will have been one of over 100,400 applicants to have been sent a text to remind you that your deadline to reply is on 9 May.

So, why did we do it?

The main reason, obviously enough, was to make sure you didn't miss the deadline for replying. Missing the deadline for replying can be stressful for those it affects as it means that your replies are automatically made for you and you decline any offers you had. You have a period of 7 days in which to get this sorted but this involves you having to call UCAS to change your replies to get it all rectified. This means more work for you and more work for UCAS.

Here are some numbers to crunch regarding contacts received (basically telephone calls, social media queries and emails) by our Contact Centre regarding the May reply deadline last year which should show what I mean:

• Contacts received in the 7 days before the May deadline asking to change replies: 1228
• Contacts received in the 7 days after the May deadline asking to change replies: 5083
• Increase in queries asking to change replies: 414%

So, from your point of view, if you can reply by the deadline then you're saved the stress of seeing your offers getting declined. You're also saved the hassle and cost of having to call us up to get it all corrected. Also, if you miss your 7 day window to correct it, it's then in the universities' hands as to whether they allow you to accept their offers.

From our point of view, it would massively reduce the amount of people contacting us to change their replies if the deadline was kept to. This would then mean that more advisers are available to answer other queries across our various channels. Everyone wins!

The final burning question that some of you will have is why you received more than one text reminding you! The answer, like with most of these things, was a 'technical glitch' which duplicated some texts. A big apology to anyone who did get more than one text - it definitely wasn't our intention to appear over-eager! Hopefully though, our reasons for sending it may now be a bit clearer.