Decision making is the process of making offers to applications or rejecting applications based on the entry requirements for programmes.

You can make decisions for individual applications or for cohorts of up to 50 applications. To make decisions, you choose to offer or reject applications as follows:

Offer

On making conditional offers, you can view the decision text that is sent to applicants when the decision is published and view the conditions of the main decision and any additional conditions in the decision builder. On making unconditional offers, you can only view the decision text.

Reject

On rejecting applications, you choose an appropriate offer for a rejection. You can also, optionally, choose the reason for the rejection. For example, when a course is already full. You can then view the decision text that is sent to the applicant.

Admissions staff with suitable permissions can customise decisions. For example, customise a decision to change the decision text or to change the required UCAS points total of an academic condition. Customising a decision creates a new offer in the offer library.

Applications have a decision status that shows the progress of the application in decision making. Before making a decision, an application has the status Not started. Then, on choosing to make an offer or reject the applicant, the status is updated to Draft.

After making decisions, you need to submit the decisions. Submitting a decision updates the application as follows:

1. Adds non-academic conditions used in the main decision or additional conditions as clearance checks to the applications. Note that clearance checks are only added to applications automatically if the applications do not already have clearance checks for the additional conditions.

2. Updates the submitted status of the application to succeeded . You can resubmit the decision to recalculate decisions that are already submitted. For example, when new qualifications are added to the application. You can also view the event logs for submitted decisions, such as to see why the submission has failed.

3. Calculates the decision status using the conditions in the main decision and additional conditions as follows:

   Passed

   The conditions of the main decision and additional conditions have been passed. Therefore, submitting unconditional offers sets the decision status to Passed.

   Failed

   The application failed to meet the offer conditions. For the decision status to be set to Failed, the applicant's qualifications must have been set to received. For more information, go to Confirm qualifications.

   Pending

   The applicant's qualifications have not been received or clearance checks are outstanding on the application. Once you know the grades, you need to confirm the qualifications, which then calculates the decision status based on their actual grades.

   Attention.

   For UCAS applications, qualifications are confirmed automatically on receiving the results from UCAS.

   Rejected

   The application was rejected.

   Attention. Note the following:

   • The submission status Submitted may be displayed briefly, typically for a few seconds, during the calculation of the decision status. You can resubmit the decision if the submissions status does not update after a few seconds.
   • Submitted decisions are recalculated if the applicant's qualification or application points are edited.

You can reset decisions or remove the additional conditions at any time until decisions are published. For example, if you notice an error or want to change the decision. Resetting the main decision updates applications as follows:

• Resets the main decision to the offer of the programme as defined in the student management system.

• Removes any clearance checks from the application that were added when submitting the decision.

• Removes any additional conditions.

• Sets the decision status to Not started.

Publishing decisions sets the published status to Completed and sends the decision to the preferred email address defined in the person profile for the applicant. Publishing decisions also exports the decisions to UCAS.

After conditional offers are published, the details of the offer conditions can be viewed by applicants on the applicant portal.

You can only publish decisions with offer libraries that are approved. On publishing a decision, the application overview is updated to show the details of decision 1, as shown in the table Decision and response summary after publishing a decision.

Respond to offers to record the response to the application on behalf of direct applicants. On responding to offers, you set the date that the offer was accepted or rejected. The application overview is then updated with the response and response date for decision 1, as shown in the table Decision and response summary after responding.

After responding to an offer, you can remove the response if, for example, you notice an error.

Offer tracking enables you to track the progress of offers. That is, track the status of the offer conditions. You can view offers in the conditions flow and, if required, override the decision status and the status of the conditions. You can add internal notes detailing the reason for overriding the decision

You can override the status of the conditions in the main decision and additional conditions. However, you cannot override included conditions. If you override the main decision, the included conditions are set to the same status as the main decision.

You can override the decision status to manually set the decision status.

After manually overriding a decision, such as setting the decision status from Pending to Passed, you need to confirm the decision. On confirming the decision, the new decision is recorded on the application overview as decision 2.