Year 12s: what will be the first way you research your future options? >>

Should you look at entry requirements when choosing courses?

I'm going to be applying for university for 2014, a year after I get my results on the 15th and have been researching courses. Obviously I need to consider entry requirements when searching for courses to know whether I can get onto them, though I'm hoping to be in the A*AA- A*AB bracket and thus have lots of options open to me. Therefore I don't know whether to use entry requirements as a guide- is it not worth looking at courses that have lower requirments? Somehow I feel snobbish by not looking at a course if the grade requirements are BBB or lower, but I feel like theres no other way to filter out "good" from "bad" considering there are so many options.

Obviously this is only in regards to initial searching, after that I obviosly will not just base my choice on grades :smile:

Thanks for the help!

Reply 1

Carnationlilyrose

Original post by sofieke15

Thanks for the help!

The safest thing to do is to apply for courses with a range of requirements so that you are covered however things pan out over the A2 year, so 1 or 2 aspirational, 2 comfortable and 1 or 2 with a margin for error. Choose only courses you would really like to attend, because you might end up going there. (Take a look at the number of threads asking how to get out of their insurance choices for an idea of how complex things can get if you don't think things through.) Often entry requirements are only an indication of how popular a course is, not how difficult it is, and popularity can depend on many things, not all of which might be relevant to you. Find a course you really want to do, at a university you really like, and if the grades are lower than you are capable of getting, well, that's a bonus, if you've chosen wisely.