Did he also receive an early offer (SRS or otherwise) from ANU?
If not, then he should put the Macquarie course as his first preference by midnight tonight (so hurry) so that he will receive his early offer for that course on the 3rd of December this Thursday. Once he accepts that offer, he is still able to switch around his preferences (which won't renege the Macquarie offer) and so secures his place at MQ unless he accepts a later offer from a different university.
After accepting his MQ offer, he must put ANU again as his first preference if he wants to be considered for a place at that university and be offered a place for the Main Round Offers. If he is eligible and his ATAR is high enough then he will receive an offer for that ANU course and he can accept this which thereby revokes his Macquarie offer.
However if he did receive an early offer from ANU then he must decide like right now which uni he wants to go to. Whichever he picks must be placed as his first preference by midnight tonight if he is to get an offer for the December 3 round in his preferred course through the early entry scheme.
Why do they do this and have this deadline? UAC just has heaps of different offer rounds. I'm not sure why the deadline is midnight tonight but that's probably just to give them time for admin and processing stuff.
If he changes back to his first choice then wouldn't everything go back to the status quo? Do you mean that if he changes back to his first choice then he won't be able to keep his MQ offer anymore? If so that's not the case, the only way his offer will be revoked is if he accepts another offer a later round.
Why would he then keep his unconditional offer at Macquarie? Not sure what you mean by this question.
You could also go on the uac website - they have heaps of information, FAQs and pdfs you could go through that would be very useful
Thanks so much for taking the trouble of replying and answering my possibly poorly worded questions.
Yes my son has accepted his unconditional offer from Macquarie.
He only got a conditional offer from ANU so still requires the ATAR to be healthy.
I just can't work out the logic of just because he said yes by tonite he gets to keep that unconditional option even though by switching back to ANU as his original first choice he is telling UAC and Macquarie he would rather study at ANU. Why would they say Ok we will preserve you a place later if you still want to come.
Why wouldn't they say Ok this guy would prefer to study at another institution we will take away his reserved place or his unconditional offer and give that place to someone who really want to study with us.
Yes it is a way of enticing students over to their Institution but by just clicking yes online it sort of guarantees you this as a backstop unless as you say you get accepted by ANU as your first choice as your ATAR gets unloaded.
It all seems a bit uneven to me. I shall ring UAC in the morning and see if they can enlighten me as to why they operate like this.
He wants to study Law/Arts at ANU because of a probable 10 bonus points.
Thanks again and hope your studies are going well.