UCAS - How to apply

How to apply

When your students should apply

We recommend that you encourage your students to complete their applications in advance of the deadline. This gives you time to check their applications and deal with any enquiries as well as allowing their referees time to make a considered statement.

Consideration of late applications is at the universities' and colleges' discretion. Students who apply late should explain any reasons for the delay in the personal statement section of the application.

Any applications received on or after the 1 July will enter Clearing.

How your students should apply

Apply is our secure web-based application system. The on-screen help text guides users through the application. They can use Apply anywhere that has internet access and can rework and resave their application as often as necessary.

Before your students can use Apply, you need to give them a 'buzzword'. Find out more about how to use Apply to manage your students' applications.

Applicants and referees can enter some European characters that are not in the English alphabet (extended character sets) in certain fields of Apply and Staff Apply. Information shown to applicants in Apply will refer to the extended characters as 'European characters'. Not all institutions can view these characters correctly, so a version of the application with substituted English characters is also made available to them. Characters that do not have a suitable ASCII English character version will be substituted with '#'.

View a full list of character substitutions from the Unicode extended character to ASCII English character version (PDF)

Choices

Your students can make up to five choices on their application. Applying for a selection of courses should increase their chances of receiving an offer. Applicants who apply to less than five choices can add further choices until 30 June as long as they have not accepted or declined any offers.

Your students should be aware of the following restrictions.

No more than four choices in any one of the following areas: medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine or veterinary science.
No more than one choice at either University of Cambridge or University of Oxford. The exception to this is:

2013 entry: if the student will be a graduate at the start of the course and they're applying for graduate medicine (course code A101) at the University of Cambridge, they can also apply to medicine (course code A100) at Cambridge, in addition to being able to apply to graduate medicine (course code A101) at the University of Oxford. No other combinations are permitted.

Art and design courses: All art and design courses are considered simultaneously and have either a 15 January or 24 March deadline. More information is available on the when to apply page.

Education

We ask students to list all their qualifications in Apply, including those that they have completed and any that they are still taking. All qualifications must be entered, even if they received an unsuccessful grade, if they are still waiting to take the final exams or if they are waiting for the results.

If they are resitting a qualification they need to enter it twice: once as a completed qualification with the grade achieved and once as a qualification with the result 'Pending'.

Full details of what to include is in the students' section - go to the education section.

Student finance

For 2012 entry, a new section relating to student finance was introduced into Apply for applicants permanently resident in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. Applicants resident in in England, Northern Ireland or Wales are asked three additional questions on whether they are likely to apply for student finance, if they would like a reminder about making their application for student finance and if they would be happy for UCAS to share data with the student finance companies.

For 2013 entry this has been extended: applicants resident in Scotland can share their application data with the Student Awards Agency for Scotland (SAAS). For applicants living in the EU (non-UK) or outside the UK, for 2013 entry there is a new page in Apply providing information and links about applying for student finance. There are no questions to answer, but they'll be asked to confirm they've read the details before they can mark the section as complete.

More details about the student finance section of Apply.

Cost of applying

2013 entry: if a student applies to more than one course, university or college they need to pay £23 GBP when they apply. If they only apply to one course at one university or college, they pay £12 GBP.

If they are making their application through your school, college or other centre, you can choose whether they pay you and you then pay us, or students can pay us directly using a credit or debit card. If you choose that they pay you, we will send you an invoice.