Applying for Joint and Single Honours at the Same Uni

[whatissthis]

1. would applying for a single honours with a clear joint personal statement disadvantage an applicant, say if a personal statement was History and Politics and someone applied for History on its own somewhere else and 2) if someone applied to both joint and single honours at the same university, a top RG one, would they still give an offer in either? DD is looking at St A's, Edinburgh, Bristol, Exeter, Durham but not sure which she would like to go for and considering applying twice to one of them

meant to add - considering applying twice for specifically Bristol and St Andrew's for Philosophy and Philosophy+English as she is not keen on Durham and feels secure to get an offer from one of her universities

bump

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/higher_education/4345181-Applying-for-2-courses-at-one-university

This wasn’t very long ago any may give you some insight

Check with the Scottish unis. Usually admittance to joint honours would allow you to switch to single honours either immediately or up to 2 years later (depending on the subjects). So you could just apply for the joint degree. The reverse used to be true but now is less so with bulge year groups meaning that switching to a joint honours having only applied for a single honours isn't guaranteed and is competitive. I remember StA saying that you aren't disadvantaged applying for joint honours but don't know if that means if you are deemed good enough for one subject but not the other they will offer single honours. I presume they guard against people choosing a higher offer rate joint subject as a back door way into a very competitive lower offer rate subject ie you only get a offer for the joint if you would have got an offer for each subject singly.

Check how Bristol assess their applications for those courses. For History it is purely gcse and A level predictions grades that are scored on a 30/70 weighting. The personal statement is only looked at in a tie break situation. Therefore if those subjects assess on the same basis they may never even read her statement.

Check out the Universities Admissions criteria for each course. Some Uni’s don’t look at Personal Statements at all eg Bristol don’t for many courses, just A levels and GCSE’s

DD strongly geared her Personal Statement to the subject she wanted to study. At Edinburgh she could only study that subject as a Joint Honours - funnily enough Edinburgh were the first to make her an offer and she actually ended up there.

Most (not all) unis are very helpful if your DD wants to phone and check anything - it's also a useful way of chosing your final five in our experience. DD phoned three with the same question, two very helpful, one passed her around a few departments and no one could help - she was promised a phone call back which never happened.