The Central Applications Office (CAO) has begun emailing all applicants who applied to the CAO by 1 February this year.

Applicants who applied using the late application facility will receive an email later in the month.

This email is referred to as the statement of application record email and all applicants should have received it by the end of May. There were 83,697 CAO applicants at the close of the late application deadline.

What do you need to do?

Students should check to see if they received the email, as it instructs applicants to log into their CAO account and confirm that all personal details, examination information, exemptions (if any) and course choices are recorded correctly on their accounts.

If you notice errors with the information, applicants are given the opportunity to correct it free of charge via their online CAO account. Examination updates made before the end of May will be updated to applicant accounts in early June.

Speaking about the process, CAO head of communications Eileen Keleghan said: “This email is designed to ensure that applicants do not miss out on a place because some of their information is incorrect or missing; for example, if there is an incorrect examination number or if an exemption is not recorded.

“If applicants notice the error now, they have the opportunity to rectify it before it’s too late.

“They can simply log in to their CAO account and click on ‘Modify Details’ where relevant and supply or edit the necessary information.”

CAO advises applicants to take the following steps:

Step one

Read the instructions in the email and on the statement of application record page online at www.cao.ie/soar.

Step two

Log in to your CAO account to review your account information, including your personal information, your examination information, course choices and supporting documentation (if you supplied any).

Step three

If there are any errors or omissions, update your information immediately (follow the instructions provided on the CAO website for modifying your account information online). Failure to correct errors or omissions at this stage may have very serious consequences and lead to the loss of a place.

Step four

You must proceed to the bottom of your account homepage and click on 'confirm' to indicate that you have checked that your account information is all present and correct and have followed the instructions in the statement of application record email and website page.

If you have clicked on 'confirm', you may still continue to add, remove or change the order of your course choices up to 5pm on 1 July.

Step five

Check the email/correspondence section of your account to ensure that your modifications or confirmation of account have been recorded.

Change of mind facility

Students applying to the CAO are now able to register an online change of course choices, free of charge until 1 July.

If the application is changed online, an acknowledgment will be sent to the email address you used at the application stage. Subject to the restrictions below, you may change course choices (without fee) as often as you wish up until the deadline.

It also cancels and supersedes all the previous course choices in any category in which changes are made.

However, choices in the two categories (Level 8 and Level 7/6) are considered to be completely separate from each other for this purpose, for example a change of Level 8 course choices will not affect Level 7/6 choices.

Do not wait until August to notify the CAO office of errors or omissions, as it will be too late to do anything about them at that stage.

For more information visit https://www.cao.ie/?page=aboutCOM.