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Rejection due to limited places

If you are rejected due to placement limitations, your application ranked too low on the ranking lists for admission. This means that neither your grade-point average nor your waiting period exceeded those of the competition.

At Universität Hamburg and in accordance with legal guidelines, ninety percent of first-year applicants are admitted—after preliminary quotas have been filled—based on qualifications and academic performance (grade-point average obtained for the Abitur) and up to ten percent are admitted based on the amount of time they have waited since completing their Abitur.*

If you are rejected due to placement limitations, you will receive  a letter of rejection stating your ranking on both the performance and waiting period lists. You application is ranked on both of these lists. 

See the section on threshold values for the threshold value of your desired program of study. The threshold value tells you both the ranking position according to performance/qualification and the ranking position according to waiting period of the last (i.e., worst) application to have succeeded in securing the applicant admission on the respective ranking list.

Using this, you can see the NC, or restriction value—the value from which admission according to the respective ranking list is granted. You can also determine how many applicants in total were admitted to a specific program.

For the degree programs offering a single major only (i.e., no teacher training programs or bachelor of arts programs with a minor), we will also include information about your ranking that would apply in the case of a succession procedure in your notification (Bescheid).

*For more information about admission procedures, quotas and the selection process, please see Bewerbungsinformationen zur Online-Bewerbung (PDF).

 See sample below:

Criteria Your values
1. Qualifications:
Grade-point average:
Ranking:
2.1
99
2. Waiting period:
Waiting period (in half-years):
Ranking:
6
53

Qualifications or performance (i.e. grade-point average)

It may be that some applicants with the same grade-point average could not be admitted because the number of applicants with this average exceeded the number of places.In these cases, admission is determined by lottery. If you have the same grade-point average as the last applicant admitted, then your rejection was the result of a lottery procedure.

Waiting period

  • The maximum number of semesters an applicant may wait amounts to 10 half-years.
  • "Waiting semesters" are the semesters counted from the time applicants receive their Abitur minus any periods of study at another university in German or abroad.

In some cases, not all applicants with the same waiting period threshhold value can be admitted as there are more applicants than places. Here, too, a lottery procedure is used. If you have the same value as the last applicant admitted, then admission was determined by lottery.
 

Do I still have chances for admission if I receive a letter of rejection?

The first line in the column "Your values" contains the value of your ranking and the second line contains your ranking position. You can compare these to the value and ranking information of the applicants last admitted. This also enables you to determine how far behind you are to the last-ranked admitted applicants.

If the rankings were very close, you may very well be offered a place in a succession procedure.

Please remember that due to so-called "technical overbooking", the number of applications far exceeds the number of places available. Since not all applicants accept offers of admission, we try to remedy this problem and to avoid long-term succession procedures by filling places as quickly as possible in the first main admission procedure.  It may very well be, therefore, that there is no formal succession procedure for the program to which you applied.

Contact

Service für Studierende (Services for Students)
Team Bewerbung und Zulassung (Application and Admissions Team)
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