Hello.....I am at a very serious dilemma. . something which has been ruining my sleep for a cupl of days now. I accepted my offers from nottingham and manchester. Nottignham's is a conditional one which i have not yet complied with. But now I have received offers from Durham and QMUL. I think i'll choose durham finally for the international trade & Commercial law. Now my dilemma is whether i can request the universities - manchester and nottingham to cancel my acceptance. In some thread i saw that such students will be blacklisted. If this is true then I am doomed. Please help....i think atleast there will be someone who have been in the same position.

fingers crossed

Actually, I am not in the same position, but comparable. I have an offer and should have send my answer by now. But I asked upfront, if I get more time, because I have more unis on my shortlist. The accepted my request.

What I would do is to call the respective offices and tell them about your problem. I think that the conditional offer is no problem and usually I do not see why u should be on a blacklist? It's a competition and they are doing it the same way on the uni side...

I have no experience of withdrawing an offer, but certainly I will, because now I have them from 5 unis. Let's see: KCL and Westminster both provide a possibility for an applicant to decline an offer, even if it was accepted initially. In my opinion this implies they are not going to punish you in any manner... To be realistic - do you seriously think they are not aware of such practice (multy-applying)?
I assume some unis may do this (blacklisting), but it is not fair...

I'll probably have to decline an accepted offer in future considering I've accepted both UCL and KCL. But I find it rather difficult to believe that they'd go to all the trouble of making a list of all student who've done that, especially 'cause it's obvious they know all applicants apply to more than one uni. I wouldn't worry too much about it... even when it comes to future plans and possibly an application for an Mlitt or Phd programme... I don't think you'd be rejected because of that.

not sure exactly what you mean by blacklisting - do you mean for future applications such as PhD courses, applications for employment etc.? I need to re-read the privacy notices on the application sites, but I doubt that retention of application data, for unsuccessful applications would be permissible for this purpose.

You can just tell them you are withdrawing your application for personal reasons. No need to specify. Or, you could make the letter politer by saying something like, "I was very happy to be accepted into University X for Course Y. However, I regret that I will be unable to attend [specify why if desired] and would therefore like to withdraw my acceptance. I hope that this does not cause too much inconvenience. Please contact me if there is any information you need." If you decline politely, there's no reason why you shouldn't even apply to the same university for a PhD etc (they always make too many offers expecting people to withdraw). And as legalalien says above there's absolutely no way they can share information which would lead to you being 'blacklisted' elsewhere. Some universities charge enrolment fees to prevent withdrawal at late stages, but even if you did drop out all you would lose is the application fee. Don't worry!

No problem at all. I rejected 5 colleges.

I am currently taking a LLM at Durham University, should you require any information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

It is not uncommon to withdraw an acceptance and there is no 'black-listing' at least in my years in postgraduate education I've never heard of such. LLM class numbers are quite volatile right up to the start date due to changes in circumstances and choices so don't lose too much sleep over this issue. However, you should withdraw your acceptance as soon as possible as other applicants could be deprived of a place due to the spot that your acceptance holds.