Spring is an exciting and nerve-racking time of year for university applicants waiting for their offers to come through, and right now UCAS is receiving more calls about responding to offers than about any other topic.

1. Wait for all your decisions
You need to wait for all your decisions before you can reply to any of them. This means you have got all the information you need to make the best available choice for you.

2. Send your replies
There are three types of reply: Firm acceptance (for your first choice – this should be the course that is your top preference); Insurance acceptance (a back-up choice, with lower grade requirements); or Decline (any offers you don’t want). You can have one firm acceptance, and one insurance acceptance only – you must decline all the other offers.
Firm acceptance – your first choice.

• If it’s an unconditional offer, the place is yours! So that course provider will expect you as their student – you won’t need to make an insurance choice.
• If it’s a conditional offer, the place is yours if you meet the offer conditions. So just in case you don’t, you can pick a second offer as a backup – your insurance acceptance. 

Insurance acceptance – the back-up choice to a conditional firm acceptance.

• Choose something with lower offer conditions, but make sure it’s somewhere you’d still be happy to go to.
• That way, if your results are lower than expected, you might still meet the conditions at your insurance choice and have your place confirmed there.
• You’ll only attend your insurance choice course if you don’t meet the conditions of your firm choice, but you do meet the conditions of your insurance or your insurance choice was unconditional when it was originally accepted.

Decline – you’ll need to decline any other offers you get.

3. What if you don’t like any of your offers, or don’t get any offers?
If you don’t want to accept any offers, you can decline them all and add more courses in UCAS Extra, one at a time. This is a process available as long as you have used all five of your choices on your UCAS application. Alternatively, you can see what courses still have vacancies later on in Clearing – which found courses for 64,000 people last year!

4. Reply on time
When your last decision comes in, UCAS will send an email to say there’s an update and you can view this on UCAS Track where you can make your replies. Your particular deadline depends on when UCAS receives the last decision in from your university or college choices, and you need to check UCAS Track to see your personal deadline.