UCAS lets you know each university’s decision as it receives them.

You don’t have to decide on any of them, until you’ve heard from the lot. Some places might try to wrangle a decision from you by saying places are filling up fast, but once they’ve made an offer they can’t easily withdraw it, so hold onto your hamsters and wait. You don’t want to say yes to one university and get an offer from your favourite the next day. Besides, it’s an important choice and important choices merit a little mulling time.

By May at the latest each university should have made its decision one way or another. Once the last one has decided, UCAS sends you a summary of the responses from all of your choices.

What to do when the offers roll in
Unconditional offers can be accepted (or rejected) right away, leaving time to relax, concentrate on revision and brag about it over a pint.

Conditional offers are more problematic. You can only hang on to two offers, so you may find yourself having to reject a few. Makes you feel powerful, eh?

First off, ditch anywhere you’ve decided you don’t like. (Although you should like most of them. Otherwise why did you apply there in the first place?) After that, it’s common practice to keep one realistic, but perhaps slightly hopeful offer and one with lower requirements as a back up. That way, if you don’t get the grades for the higher one, you have a university-shaped safety net to fall back on.

That’s assuming that the places that require the highest grades are the ones you most want to go to. That’s not always true and, if there’s one that floats your canoe more than the others, choose that offer as your ‘firm’ acceptance, regardless of the grades (so long as you think you stand a short-sighted archer’s hope of hitting them).

We say ‘firm acceptance’, because that’s what UCAS calls the first of the two offers you can accept. Your ‘firm acceptance’ means, if they’ve made a conditional offer and you meet those conditions, that’s where home will be come September.

You can keep another offer as your back up, or ‘insurance’ offer. If you miss the grades for your first choice, but meet the conditions for the second, then you’ll be going there instead.

It’s a bad idea to accept an offer without visiting the place first. That would be like a three-year-long blind date. In the dark. Wearing the wrong shoes. You can look around at a scheduled open day (usually advertised on the universities’ websites), when you go for an interview or simply by rocking up whenever you’ve got the time.

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