Offer letters

Successful applicants will receive offer letters by mid January.  Although we give details of the academic conditions of the offer, the formal offer will be made via UCAS.  Applicants who are applying to other universities as well as Cambridge should wait until they have received decisions from all the institutions on their UCAS form before deciding which offer to accept as their first choice, and which to accept as an insurance offer.  In the meantime, if the terms of the offer are unclear in any way you should contact us to ask for clarification. Offers will be 'firm' for Post-A-level candidates, 'conditional' for Pre-A-Level. If you are informed that your application has been placed in the Winter Pool for consideration by colleges with unfilled places, you may be interviewed in early January by another college, which may then make you an offer. If you receive notification that your application has been unsuccessful, this is the end of the Cambridge application process, although you can apply to a college other than St John's the following year. 

Once an offer has been formally accepted via UCAS the focus should be on making sure that the relevant student support body is contacted, and that paperwork is completed on time.

As we make more offers than we have places available, we find that there is very little room for manoeuvre in August when the A-level results come through.  In effect, this means that those who do not meet or exceed the conditions of their offer are normally passed on to the university where they are holding their insurance offer.  We have a meeting of the Admissions Committee to finalise all decisions, and to consider the cases of those who, for legitimate and exceptional reasons, have failed to make their offers.  All offer-holders must meet all the conditions of their offer by 31 August.

All those whose first language is not English will be required to achieve a qualification in English (either GCSE or IELTS examinations) and this will be a mandatory part of their conditional offer.

If you receive a conditional offer but do not meet the grades in your A-levels, all may not be lost! We set our conditional offers high because the higher we set them, the more offers we can make, thus giving more applicants the chance to compete for a place. But we do not realistically expect to fill all our available places with applicants who satisfy the conditions we set; so in practice some relaxation of the conditions may be made for certain applicants once the examination results are known. If, however, we are still unable to confirm your place, then your application may be placed in a 'pool' in August where it will be available for consideration by Colleges still be looking to fill some of their places. In this instance you will not be required to come for further interviews. Final decisions about all conditional-offer applicants are made by the end of August, and generally within a week of the publication of A-Level results.