Replying to offers: give yourself enough time

You’ve waited anxiously for your university choices to make their decisions. You’ve logged in to Track to check thousands of times and now you’ve finally received all your offers. You’re probably thinking “What a relief, the wait is over!” but don’t relax just yet, as once you get to this stage there’s a big decision to make: which offers will you accept?

Know your reply deadline
Although you might still be weighing up your different offers, there’s one thing that’s certain, and that’s the deadline you need to reply by. If you’re wondering when it is, it all depends on when you received the universities’ decisions. The first deadline is 7 May, which is for those who received all decisions by 31 March, but Track will display the right deadline for you so make sure you check.

Reply sooner rather than later
Whether you’re one of the people whose deadline is 7 May or not, once you’ve had decisions from all of your choices then it’s a good idea to reply to your offers sooner rather than later. That’s not to say you should rush your replies though – it’s really important to think carefully until you know which you’d like to make your firm and insurance choices. But once you’ve made your decision it’s best not to wait until the last minute.

You might think you’ve got plenty of time but don’t let the reply deadline creep up on you. The unavoidable truth is that if you leave it until deadline day to reply to your offers in Track, you’ll be feeling the pressure – even panicking. When you’re rushing it’s more likely that you’ll make a mistake, which could mean selecting the wrong replies. Just imagine – you’ve spent months perfecting your application and working towards meeting the conditions of your dream offer and you accidently select ‘decline’ instead of ‘firm’!

Now that’s not to say this doesn’t happen to even the most prepared applicants. You may be able to change your replies within seven days of making them – if you call us then we'll be able to let you know if this is possible.

Avoid unnecessary stress
If you miss the reply deadline altogether you’ll end up lumbered with unnecessary stress, as the offers you received will be automatically declined. We call it ‘declined by default’ and if you find yourself in this situation you should contact our customer service advisers straight away – they’ll be able to accept your chosen offers, but only if you get in touch within seven days.

So the most important piece of advice is to give yourself enough time to reply before the deadline. Here are just some of the benefits of replying in good time:

1. You’ll get peace of mind –  your replies will be done and dusted and out of the way, so you can begin enjoying your summer
2. You’ll avoid last minute problems – you’ll have the chance to ask for help from your teachers and UCAS, should you need it. 
3. You’ll be able to make plans – universities and colleges will often wait until you’ve replied before they let you apply for accommodation. 

For help replying to your offers, take a look at our post Replying to university offers: the big questions or watch our video guide.

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.

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.