Advice for Schools

Please ensure that intermediate-level qualifications such as GCSEs and Standard Grades are included on the application: Faculty requirements (e.g. for a science) will often apply to these qualifications even though offers are framed in terms of more advanced qualifications.

Don't forget to include predicted grades for any examinations yet to be taken: omitting these can suggest that your predictions are too low to mention.

If there are strong medical or personal reasons for an applicant's poor performance, make sure these are set out clearly in the reference.

Occasionally, we see references which are poorly expressed and littered with errors of spelling and grammar. Such a reference does little to inspire confidence in the school's judgment of the unfortunate applicant's abilities.

Important Note for Scottish Schools:

There is a trend in some schools towards encouraging pupils to take only three Highers in their fifth year, with more taken in the sixth. St Andrews requires a minimum of 4 Highers. Applicants whose exam results have been obtained over 2 diets (thereby giving them a lighter workload) are required to meet higher entry standards than those who obtained their results in a single sitting. This is the case no matter whose decision it was to split the exams over two diets. For applicants to English single or joint honours,  this means an applicant whose results come from two exam diets would have to meet a minimum asking rate of AAAA rather than the AAAB asked from the single-sitting applicants.