Priorities When Submitting Applications, and Why They Matter

Priorities

Priorities are the list of competitive offers — each one a combination of specialty, university, department and degree program — that the applicant has applied to. In their electronic account, the applicant assigns each of them an ordinal number, where 1 means the highest priority (the most desired specialty). Once applications close and the ranking lists for each specialty are drawn up, the EDBO system automatically distributes applicants across the state-funded places.

The enrollment algorithm:

1. The system analyses the applicant’s position in the ranking lists of every specialty they applied to.
2. Enrollment happens on the specialty with the highest priority (the lowest ordinal number) where the applicant’s competitive score is high enough to take an available state-funded place at the moment the system processes their application.
3. If the specialty with the highest priority has no places left, or the applicant’s competitive score is not high enough, the system checks whether enrollment is possible on the specialty with the next priority down.
4. The process continues through the applicant’s list of priorities until the first successful enrollment or until the list runs out.

The key principle: enrolling an applicant on a specialty with any priority (even a lower one) automatically ends their participation in the competition for every specialty with a lower priority on the list. For example, being enrolled on priority 3 rules out enrollment on priorities 4 and 5. In that case the applicant can enter the programs that sat at priorities 4 and 5 only on a fee-paying basis.

A strategy for ordering priorities for a state-funded place

Drawing up the list of priorities is a mandatory part of applying and calls for a strategic approach:

• Priority 1 (the highest): give it to the specialty the applicant is most interested in, and the one with the highest cut-off score. That leaves the chance of a state-funded place further down the list of priorities if they do not get in here.
• Priorities 2–3 (middle): give these to specialties the applicant finds acceptable that consistently have a lower cut-off score than priority 1, or to a similar field at another university or another faculty. These are the main fallback options.