UCAS

Well, last week was fun.  'A' Level results are incredibly stressful, already.  But UCAS don't help at all.

It appears they opened the results Web sit early (at sevenish rather than eight in the morning) for a 'soft launch'.  In other words, anyone who connected in at that time could find out there results early, and possibly hae a head start with Clearing if they hadn't achieved what they had hoped for.  Not a good idea, perhaps.

But then it got worse: the fact that the site was open early was Tweeted and Facebooked and otherwise socially networked around the Web.  So by eight o'clock (the original published opening time) it was swamped, with no chance of anyone connecting.  So they had to take the site down.

This is not the first time it has happened of course.  But with the demand for  courses (as students try to avoid the iniquitous £9000 fees), clearing has become much more competitive, with the remaining places going much faster, it appears.  So for the students involved a much worse experience.

There are well-established technologies to prevent such problems happening, but it appears UCAS don't use them.

However, what I don't understand is why clearing has to open on results day.  Why not set up a couple of days as a gap, so that everyone can see their results, and get their head straight about what they want to do, and research alternatives, before clearing opens up? 

That way, UCAS would have to cope with a much smaller number of eager users (albeit still large-ish), with a much clearer focus.  Further, if the site went down for a while on Results day, no-one would really be disadvantaged,