Entry requirements - UCAS point range

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The UCAS tariff for the course my DC wants to study is 120-104. How does a student know whether they will be offered 104 or 120 (that's a 2 A-level grade difference so quite significant when thinking of where to apply!)

Former admissions tutor here, although my School makes offers on specific A Level grades. Schools stating a range of offers are formally stating the flexibility to tailor offers to applicant circumstances.

Sometimes the lower offer is contextual. I suppose an applicant’s offer could depend on which qualifications they present. This isn’t an issue in my School. In the bad old days when grade distributions were very strict indeed, pupils from the exceptionally high achieving school attended by DH routinely got higher offers than those from the nearby state schools on the grounds that they had significant educational advantages (they probably did). This is still allowed; indeed tutors have the freedom to make just about any offer we wish. It goes without saying we need to be able to justify each offer within the university. Virtually all variability between offers is policy driven, AFAIK.

@poetryandwine Thanks for this. We're not contextual so I'm not sure whether to take a chance that DC will end up with the lower offer (it would be an insurance choice in any case - albeit if they give him an offer at the high end of the scale, it would be no insurance whatsoever!). Bit frustrating tbh

That’s tricky. If there are other good Insurance options, so your DS can afford to experiment with one, it might be fine to risk it. I don’t know enough about his situation to offer an opinion, but in general I believe each applicant needs to be confident they will make their Insurance offer, or what is the point?

Every summer this Board is full of sad threads from DMs of applicants who used other strategies