Extenuating Circumstances

Extenuating circumstances are any disruption or disadvantage to your education or home life. This could include health, disability, difficulties with schooling (other than Covid-19), or challenging personal or family circumstances. 

There are examples of extenuating circumstances on this page. 

Your referee will need to set your circumstances out in the Extenuating Circumstances section of the UCAS reference. We will take the information into account, and no further details are needed.  

In the vast majority of cases we should receive information about extenuating circumstances in the UCAS reference. Putting the information in the UCAS reference is normally enough, but there are three cases when this may not be possible:

> if your referee needs to give us further information than the the reference space allows

> if the information is highly sensitive and should be confidential 

> if your current school is not aware of your extenuating circumstances

In these cases, please ask a teacher, tutor or relevant professional (e.g. a doctor or a care worker) to send an Extenuating Circumstances Form to us (admissions@christs.cam.ac.uk) as an email attachment. The form must be sent directly by the professional - you cannot send it yourself. 

The deadline for any Extenuating Circumstances Forms is 22 October (23:59). Meeting this deadline ensures that the form is part of your application from the beginning.

Please also read the page for applicants with a disability, neurodiverse condition, Mental health condition or long-term health condition. In some cases it is appropriate to send both forms.

If we receive any Extenuating Circumstances Forms after the 22 October deadline, we will accept them, however please be aware that we can only consider information that is part of your application at the time it is read. Forms sent later in the application process may be too late for the stage when we are selecting students for interview, but in that case they would be considered as part of any post-interview decision-making.

Once decisions have already been made, it is not possible for us to alter them in the light of new information. 

No - inclusion of extenuating circumstances in an application does not guarantee selection for interview. We look at all of the information in an application together (taking into account the extenuating circumstances) before deciding which candidates we would like to select for interview.