Down With Numbers

It would appear I haven’t updated for a while. Oh well.

I’m currently embroiled in the madness that is UCAS, the British system for applying to university. Unfortunately, the thousands of people applying in this current cycle are guinea pigs on two different fronts. I’ll speak of the first front here, and the second one at a later date if I can’t think of anything else to say.

In Britain, application to university is done through the medium of UCAS; you choose up to six universities, put them down on a form, write 500 words selling yourself, and then wait. It turns out that this is the first cycle of applicants who can only apply to universities online - the traditional paper form has been removed from existence. Of course, what with this being a government-type thing, they completely underestimated the demand, despite having figures of exactly how many people applied to university last year.

In a nutshell, the online system went to hell in a handbasket. Because of the universities I chose to apply to, I am one of a few thousand whose application deadline was a couple of months earlier than the more general one. Indeed, there’s only about a month from going back to school to having the whole thing sent.

So in early October, I pressed the big evil Send button. From that point on, whenever I would log in to the system I received a message instructing me that my application would be processed within 24 hours and I would be given details to log in to the online application tracking system.

With hindsight, there were two problems with that statement. It was about ten days before I received a letter from UCAS telling me that my application had been processed, and the online application tracking system didn’t go online until 15 days ago.

Plus there was some random stuff in the papers about UCAS bungling the sending of applications’ information to their universities.

Wait, what? Bungling? Yes, UCAS messed up big time. Universities were unable to get at the applications through their own online system due to it constantly crashing, and the paper copies they were sent were riddled with incomplete information or were missing altogether.

Excellent.

At a more personal level, my school managed to send an additional paper form that one of my university choices requires to the wrong destination, leading to a frantic fifteen minutes glued to a phone; another university input the wrong postcode into their system, although their letter still got to me somehow; and a third university sent me an e-mail acknowledging my application twice.

Hmm.