COLLEGE CHOICE:THOUSANDS OF you have logged on to the CAO website over the past 24 hours and accepted one of your choices, writes BRIAN MOONEY
Most of you are probably waiting to hear from colleges about registration and other practical details.
If you are abroad and have completed this process online, please contact your parents to let them know that the acceptance process is now completed.
Why should you do this? Quite apart from the fact that your parents are in a state of high anxiety about this mysterious CAO process, they have also probably received a written CAO offer at your home address and they are probably wondering what they should do with it.
My advice to these parents whose sons and daughters are abroad is to ignore the written offer, once you know they have accepted an offer online.
I have received an offer of my first choice but I now want to study my second-preference course. How can I do this?
You cannot be offered a course lower down your order of preference than the one you have currently been offered, so you will not be offered your second choice.
The only way you can study a course other than the one you have currently been offered is to check out the list of vacant places currently on offer on the CAO website at www.cao.ie.
These are courses that have not received sufficient applicants to fill the number of places on offer from the college in question.
If you find a course that you want to apply for, go into your record in the CAO website and place the new course above the course you have been offered in round one.
If this facility does not offer you a solution to your problem, your only option is to defer attending college this year and to reapply to the CAO again in January 2010, placing the course you now want at the top of your CAO application list.
How are places on the vacant places list allocated?
Colleges are now releasing back into the system any places that they failed to find an applicant for in the first round of the CAO offers.
These places will be allocated according to the normal CAO rules, ie, that you have met the course entry requirements, and based on the points score of those seeking the vacant places.
If you have not secured a suitable offer to date, it is worth keeping an eye on the vacant places list.
The CAO will offer these places at the same time as round two offers, on Friday, August 28th. After that date, vacant places will be filled on a first come, first served basis.
I just missed out on my first-choice course. What chance do I have of getting my course in a later round?
The CAO will make a second round of offers to candidates on Friday, August 28th.
Any places not taken up in round one will be reoffered at that time.
If the course for which you were short on points falls into that category, you may be offered a place in round two at that time.
The Irish Timeswill publish details of these offers on August 28th, outlining all such reductions.
Any other options?
If the round two offers do not help, you should submit a request to have one or more of your papers remarked in the hope that you will be upgraded.
The deadline is 5pm on Wednesday, September 2nd.
Results of appeals will be issued in early October.
More than 20 per cent of such remarked scripts were upgraded in 2008, so having a paper regraded if you are five or 10 points short of your desired course is well worth considering.