Hi my name is Mike Nicholson, I'm Director of Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach at the
University of Bath. Clearly we've had quite a lot of changes in recent weeks, from government
announcing changes to exams, so we now know that in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England,
the exams won't be running in the same way as we had previously anticipated. Now you may be a
little bit worried about that, but you shouldn't be. The University of Bath has anticipated all
along that there might be changes to assessment methods this year, and we're geared up to ensure
that whatever format your final results are presented to us we'll be able to engage
with you and your schools and colleges to make sure that we can process those results and sort
out what's happening with your place. So there's probably going to be some changes between now
and when you get to the end of the school year. We'll continue to keep you informed as things
develop, but please, please, please don't worry about the circumstances, and we'll be in touch
if we require any further information from you or your school or college. Clearly at this point
in time there's been quite a lot of change to your circumstance with regards to your application,
the university is obviously keeping informed about what's going on with school closures so if it's
something that's a kind of national issue where schools are closing, you don't really need to
tell us about any of that in any communications because we'll be aware of it and we'll be taking
that into account when we look at your final assessments on your qualifications.
However there will be individual circumstances and situations which crop up which will have a
bearing on how things are with you, it could be things related to family circumstance,
it could be related to your own health or those close to you, and if that's the case we do have
a system in place to look at mitigating circumstances, and we'd encourage you and
your school or college to engage with that process so that when we do get your final assessments and
your results we'll be able to factor that in to the decisions that we make later this year. The
information is available on the website and you'll also be reminded of the process in regular updates
from the University, but if at any stage between now and the end of this school year you have
a change in your circumstances it's very much affecting you personally please don't hesitate
to get in touch. We have had quite a number of inquiries recently from students who are concerned
about what will happen if they don't quite get the grades this year that they were anticipating.
Now that's not unusual, clearly this year is different to other years but every year we have
some students who don't meet the conditions of their offer when they're holding a firm place at
the University of Bath, so what we're planning to do this year, we look in detail at the situation
where we've got courses that still have capacity to take students, we'll look very
closely at where you've maybe missed the grades. If it's a course requirement so for instance if
you're applying to do an engineering degree and you haven't got the specified requirements in
mathematics for instance, then we probably won't be able to do an awful lot in that situation,
but if it's not directly relevant to the course, if it's not a course requirement, we may have a
little bit of flexibility, but only where we've actually still got space on the course. You don't
have to do anything, that information will be provided to us as anticipated through UCAS,
and through the exam boards, but what we would encourage you to do is if there's been any change
in your circumstances that's a personal situation, a personal circumstance, then we'd encourage you
to use our mitigating circumstances process to make sure that we are made aware of this long
before we get your results this summer. We're going to be obviously keeping you up to date
with changes in any of the situations that are taking place with qualifications, but to be
effective in doing that we need to make sure that we have the right email address for you, so please
make sure that if you have any changes in your contact details whether it be your home address,
your email or your phone number, you let us know through the Bath tracker which is the applicant
portal that you've been registered on as part of your application to the University of Bath.
We'll continue to keep in touch with you over the course of this academic year.
It's also I think important for you to be aware that we'll be using email primarily as a means
of getting in touch with you to tell you about changes or plans for teaching next year and also
any changes in things like accommodation application deadlines or anything like that
so please, please make sure that the information is up to date. If there are any questions that
you haven't been able to find the answer to on our website the team are currently
home working but you can still contact them by email through admissions@bath.ac.uk and the team
are also linked up by phone so if you need to phone us please use the admissions phone line
and we'll be able to hopefully respond to your call. We don't however have anybody
here on site so please don't feel that you need to get in a car and come and visit us.