Can you explain why it takes so many days for a University to assess an application? What are the stages involved? 

How long does it take for unis to make offers?

There's no hard and fast rule when it comes to hearing back from a university. Applications for certain courses can take longer than others. For competitive courses like medicine and dentistry, or those requiring an interview or audition, it's likely it'll take universities longer to respond.

"A majority of universities will start making offers on a daily basis once applications open. They will process them anywhere between a few days to a few weeks after submission, depending on how busy they are," comments Kevin Betts from the University of Sussex.  "Other universities will do what is called ‘gathering the field’ where they will not make any offers at all until the Ucas deadline. Of course, all applicants are given equal consideration up to and including the Ucas final submission date. "If a student wants to know how their application will be treated and processed, they should contact the university directly.

How is University application processed?

You may be wondering how long it will take for Ucas to process your application. As soon as you hit submit on your application, Ucas will fire this off to the universities you've indicated on your application. Now it's down to those universities whether to make you an offer or not.

The journey your application makes once it's received by an institution varies slightly depending on both the university and the course, but typically it'll be seen by more than one pair of eyes – often by both

1. General admissions staff
2. Academic tutors.

Typically, there are two ways in which applications are processed – either a centralised process or a collegiate/decentralsied process

Centralised Process

• A centralised process involves all applications being submitted to one admissions team that will generally be within the university’s professional services team. They’re professional non-academic staff whose job is to specifically review all applications.
• If somebody meets all of University criteria and are deemed as suitable for offer), then the staff can make an offer without an admissions tutor seeing it. If, however, the applicant is ‘non-standard’ or is a borderline case, they will refer that application to the admissions tutor, who will make the final decision. 

Collegiate / De-centralsied process

• The devolved or collegiate system means that applications are delivered to teams in each school or college of study. Effectively, a similar method to the centralised system is undertaken but perhaps with a little more academic input. Applications are screened by central admissions team then forwarded to academic admissions tutors who are able to view the full application electronically and make a decision. This decision is then checked by the central admissions team.

The admissions tutors work closely with a team of subject-focused admissions administrators to process the large volume of applications received to ensure that each is given the attention it deserves. In total, there are number of staff across the University who have responsibility for decision-making in their areas of expertise.

What are university tutors looking for?

First up, tutors will check that you meet their entry criteria:
 - University look initially for applicants who meet the entry requirements for the course. This means looking at each individual application and seeing if they have the right amount of Percentage or Ucas Tariff points for the programme and also the right subject knowledge

They're looking for evidence that you're really enthusiastic about the course:
 - Successful applicants are those who have researched carefully what subjects and grades they need to do their chosen course at their chosen universities, and have also clearly articulated in their personal statement why they want to study what they’ve applied for.

They've also got to weigh up your application against the competition:

University may determine who gets an offer based on the strength of the field. For highly selective courses, University may request additional information, for example a sample of work such as an essay you've written and they want to make sure that you'll be a good fit for the university:

It is, of course, important that each personal statement is exactly that: personal. What universities are trying to do is paint a picture of the applicant – University want to assess their suitability for studying the course, but also understand what makes them tick. Universities are just like people – they have personalities and they have foibles, so they want to make sure people fit nicely into that institution.
 

There are basically 7 stages of Student Evaluation checks done by the university before issuing an offer to the students. If the student meets all the criterias an Unconditional offer is issued, else the university or college may issue a conditional offer of request for additional information. 

Academic History check:

Generally it takes the University between 1-6 weeks to issue a final offer. This does not mean they sit on your application and wait out these weeks because they have written it will take them this long. There are several stages in assessing an application, and depending upon how long the queue is, it might take several days before the admissions team even picks up your case. The queues are longer closer to the intakes so it is always advisable to not leave applying for a course at a University to a date close to the last arrival date, as several students do. The earlier you apply, the quicker your application should get assessed, and the probability of a seat being confirmed for you is higher. 

Back to assessment process, it takes an assessment officer several hours to go through your documents and profile and take a decision whether they can offer you with or without conditions. Generally an assessment officer is able to take a look at 9.4 (industry average) new cases in a day. Besides looking at new cases, several of their existing cases might make a comback with a query or additional information, or a request for change of course, etc which also needs to be turned around within their SLA. Thus if an assessment officer recieves more than 10 new applications a day, it is likely the queue with the officer grows and your case comes up for assessment serveral days after submission. 

Now Universities cannot recruit assessment officers for peak times, this will be a complete wastage of manpower during off peak times. The role of an assessment officer is quite difficult and it is not easy to recruit and train temporary workers for this. Thus every University functions with an optimal admissions team and this explains the time taken for an application to be assessed, which varies according to the peak/off peak/standard times. 

An assessment officer has an onerous responsibility of ensuring your application matches the requirements of the course at the particular University. Remember there are over a 1000 schools across several countries following hundreds of curriculum and your academic documents while they seem straight forward to might appear complicated to the assessing officer. The assessing officer will need time therefore to ensure that not only does he correctly calculates your previous academic performance, it matches the entry requirements too. Trust me, this is no simple task. We should be grateful for the effort the assessment officer makes particularly if he/she receives applications from different countries with many different curriculum (A Level, SSC, Btec, etc) and the varied forms of marksheets submitted by applicants.