UCAS - Course coding principles

Course coding principles

This course coding outline summarises the principles behind the allocation of UCAS course codes and JACS codes to individual courses within the UCAS scheme. For further information, please contact the Data Collection Team on 01242 544864 or coursesdata@ucas.ac.uk.

Introduction

The Data Collection Team receives a number of new courses each day via web-link. These courses must be assigned both a UCAS course code and also between one and three JACS codes. To help the team assign accurate classification codes to these courses, institutions are strongly encouraged to provide a short summary in the 'Notes and contacts' field of each new course form on web-link, indicating the topics that students can expect to study on the course.

Courses are classified based on course title and content. The 'Full title' field on web-link should be filled in accurately, without abbreviations where at all possible. For combined courses (those where two equally weighted subjects are offered together, such as sport and finance, or sport and design, or major/minor combinations such as sport with design) institutions should avoid using a forward slash to indicate the word 'and' or the word 'with'. A forward slash should only be used where a course title would otherwise be written 'and or with'.

The Data Collection Team has a list of standard abbreviations to be used for the 'Full title' and 'Short title' fields on web-link. If you would like further information on this, please email coursesdata@ucas.ac.uk.

Subject classification

Courses are given a subject classification using the JACS3 codes. A course may be classed as a single subject, a balance of two equally weighted subjects, a major/minor combination, or a triple combination of three equally weighted subjects. Depending on which of these is chosen, the course will have between one and three JACS codes assigned to it. Institutions do not have access to these codes until the *J HESA returns are distributed. The JACS codes are used during the compilation process of several UCAS publications including the Progression Guides series, to divide courses into subject-related sections and chapters.

Course coding

The UCAS course codes have no meaning other than "this course is offered by this institution for this application cycle". With the growth in the number of courses in the UCAS scheme, it is now impossible to maintain any code:subject or code:structure relationship. All courses submitted to web-link receive a four-character UCAS course code, which may consist of four numbers, four letters, or a combination of letters and numbers in any order.

It is UCAS policy to allocate course codes for UCAS providers only where valid courses are being published for application. Further details relating to this can be found under the section on Application and Recruitment Policy in the UCAS Admissions Guide and Decisions Processing Manual, available in the Admissions expained section of this site. Some institutions have previously asked for codes to be generated for courses which are not or no longer administered by UCAS in order to enter these courses on the Student Loans Company (SLC) course database. The UCAS course code is not a mandatory field on the SLC course database and as long as courses meet the designation requirements for student support, then courses which fall into this category can be added to the system without it.

Combinations, modular and joint honours programmes

For modular courses traditionally assigned a UCAS course code beginning with a 'Y', these courses should be submitted with adequate content information to enable three JACS codes to be assigned to the course. For courses with the title 'Combined programme' or 'Joint honours programme' for example, if the subject areas included within the programme cannot be covered by three individual JACS subject areas, then the course combinations should be submitted separately onto web-link so that each combination can be sufficiently classified.

For example:

Course title: Combined arts programme

This course would be allocated up to three JACS codes drawn from the W - Creative arts and design section.

Course title: Humanities joint honours scheme

This course would be allocated up to three JACS codes based on the subjects within the scheme, such as V - Historical and philosophical studies, F800 Physical geographical sciences, or R - European languages, literature and related subjects.

Course title: Joint honours

This course would be referred back to the institution with a request for more information on the subjects area of the course, and a suggestion that the individual course combinations be added separately to web-link.

Last updated: 19 October 2012