While your school or college will have probably given you plenty of guidance about the first stages of the UCAS application process, such as using the UCAS site and writing your personal statement, it could well be that you’ve been given much less guidance about clearing. This is probably unsurprising if you take into account the fact that clearing is not the primary way that people get places at university, but rather the final step that matches course places with students who for whatever reason did not have an offer that they had accepted by June.

The information vacuum about clearing means that many people who will be going into clearing at the end of this week will have plenty of questions about the process. So today we thought we’d take the time to answer some of the most common questions about clearing.

Can I apply for a different course to the one I chose originally with clearing?

Yes, there’s nothing at all stopping you from doing this. The only thing you’ll need to bear in mind is that if the course choice you’re now going for is substantially different from your original ones–which will have meant that your personal statement was tailored for a subject that you’re no longer applying for–you may need to explain your change of heart to the admissions officers. This isn’t as difficult as it may first sound: it’s largely a question of being able to explain why you are interested in the subject that you have now chosen.

Can I apply for courses I was rejected from before?

In principle this should be okay, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing this. However, it is worth checking with the university that you want to apply to that they accept people through clearing for a course they’ve already applied for and been rejected from.

Can I apply for more than one course at a time with clearing?

Sort of. In practice, much of the applying through clearing involves getting in contact with admissions officers and teaching staff from the course that you want to apply for. As this is a direct process between you and the university, you can get in touch with as many different universities during the clearing period as you want. It’ll be at this stage that most universities will make your mind up about you.

The reason we have answered this question ‘sort of’ rather than an outright ‘yes’ is because you can’t formally apply for more than one course through the UCAS clearing system at a time. But since this stage of the process is the one that you’ll only really do once you’ve got an idea from the university that they’re interested in you, this isn’t such a big issue; it just means that if you have been in touch with two or more universities at around the same time you can’t then go on to put your application in through the UCAS system all at the same time; it’ll be more a question of making your decision on which one you want to go to most before you make your formally put in your clearing choice online.