#6 Receiving and Responding to UCAS offers

As a UCAS student, be prepared to spend many a free period constantly refreshing track or your emails...
When a university replies to your offer you will get an email notification saying that 'your status has changed' with a link to your track, when you have your offer, click on it and it will give you your conditions. These will outline what it is you need to achieve for the university to grant you a place (Unless you are lucky enough to be granted an Unconditional offer!), and range from UCAS points to grades, to extra qualifications. Make sure you read these offers very carefully and consider them. Also have a look to see how above or below the standard offer for your course they are, this can give an indication of either a) how much they like and want you or b) how over/under subscribed your course is!

If you are unfortunate enough to receive any rejections, it is worth emailing them to find out why, in case there is a mistake, or you can learn from an error in your application.

Once you have heard back from all of your universities, you have a certain amount of time to respond to these offers (this will be displayed in your track). Think very carefully about which university offer to select as your Firm and your Insurance, and make sure, unless you really badly want that firm, that your insurance choice has a lower requirement than your firm!
You have to select from a menu either 'Firm' , 'Insurance' or 'Decline' for each course that you have applied for, and (last year at least) you had to select the options all at once.

Best of luck to all. I hope this was clear as I feel I rambled a tad!

#5 The UCAS Application

I'm afraid I can't offer specific advice with screen shots and the such like because UCAS has undergone a bit of a shiny update... so I don't know how similar things are to how they were when I applied a year ago!

But my advice is as follows:

1. Apply early - this doesn't always guarentee quick answers, but it puts you at the front of the queue and takes the pressure off of you.
2. Have your first draft of your personal statement by the time you're back after the summer, and have an idea of your top unis first
3. If in any doubt about any part of the application, first ask your form tutor or head of year, if they can't help, give UCAS a call or check their FAQs
4. In general  the process is really quite straight forward, just check everything you write for typos, and make sure you have the correct email etc (though personal details can be changed after application)
5.  As an aside to '4', I was quite daunted by the fact that my school never gave us any hints about what the application process is like. Watch videos to help such as this one! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZGb7nQEQ8M
6. If you didn't do as well as expected on an AS exam you still enter the grade on UCAS. For example I unfortunately got an E in AQA History at AS, so i resat. You enter the subject twice into your qualifications, once with your current grade (E for me) and once with grad 'Pending', which indicates that you are resitting one or more modules in order to change your overall grade.
7. Remember to enter other qualifications (I did the AQABacc Extended project but forgot to declare it... whoops! Thankfully my head of Sixth Form said that UCAS will pick up on this and the unis will get my result anyway!)
• add anything which gives you UCAS points! For example some music and dance examinations do... for a full list see here ... http://www.ucas.com/how-it-all-works/explore-your-options/entry-requirements/tariff-tables 

GOOD LUCK! I hope I've covered everything useful, but if you have any questions please