Undergraduate admissions guide and resources

To help you identify key information more easily, and to enable referees to provide the clear, concise information you need, the free-text approach to references has been replaced with three structured sections. This will help advisers and referees focus on the areas you want to know more about.

The sections comprise of:

• a general statement about the school, college or centre, or independent referees are asked to provide an overview of their relationship with the applicant
• any information about extenuating circumstances which may have impacted the applicant’s education and achievement
• any other supporting information specific to the applicant and/or the course(s) they’re applying to which the referee feels you should be aware of

For 2024, we’ve simplified our application fees to support student choice. There will only be one application fee of £27.50, enabling applicants to add up to five choices, as well as allowing them to take advantage of all the additional services UCAS has to offer, such as Extra, Clearing, and Clearing Plus.

There will no longer be a single choice application fee.

The application fee will be £28.50 for 2025 entry.

In response to feedback, and to improve the student experience, we have added two new options to the gender question.

Applicants are now able to select from:

• Man
• Woman
• I use another term
• I prefer not to say

We’ll continue to work with students, advisers, and universities and colleges, to explore how we can improve the options available for future cycles.

JISC (formerly HESA) does not require the national and dual national identity information applicants have previously given. Therefore, we have removed these questions from the application, and you will no longer receive these details in your end of cycle data for 2024.

Please note, this does not affect the nationality and dual nationality questions, which remain in the application. 

We’ve made changes to the tables which hold the Exam level data – a maximum of ten characters can be entered for exam level codes.

Newly added exam levels will be displayed in web-link, xml-link, and odbc-link.

We’ve enhanced our Confirmation decision process so that an insurance choice will be automatically declined when an applicant is placed at their firm choice.

A new “Auto-Declined” report has been introduced into the Management Information section in web-link to provide details of the applicants whose insurance choices were auto-declined by the system. 

We’ve added a range of new questions to the application related to disadvantaged and under-represented student cohorts.

For the first time cohorts such as, carers, estranged students, parents, service children, veterans, and more will be able to flag their circumstances in the UCAS application.

We’ve simplified Confirmation and Clearing by decommissioning the Adjustment service.

Applicants are no longer able to register for Adjustment and the relevant Management Information menus will be removed from web-link to support this.