Lost in translation?: A quest in the maze that is UCAS

Nearly everyone who speaks English knows that, as British author Oscar Wilde once said, the US and the UK are countries "separated by a common language." Never were words so true!

It's been a ridiculous amount of effort running around trying to renew a passport (it should have been easy, right...? Wrong! Leave it to a tiny town to get everything backwards and confused.). 

In the meantime, I've been steadily filling out my UCAS application. The UCAS is sort of a third-party site that seems to be mandatory when applying to most universities within the UK. Unlike American schools, you don't send your application directly through to your schools of choice (and pay mega bucks to do so), but rather you can select up to five schools to apply to for a ridiculously low price of £21 or even just £11 if you've only got your heart set on one school. Compare that to the $30+ fees it takes to submit just one application to just about any university in the U.S., and you start to realize that maybe the UK is doing something right, here! 

Still, I was thrown for several loops when confronted with this enigma. What on earth constitute as qualifications? What do you mean, I don't have to send every single transcript of every higher education institution I've ever been to? Can it really be that simple?

Not if you have no idea what they're talking about! Translating from UK university-speak and applying it to American school terms (and vice versa, for that matter) is a task that has both my and my UWE-based advisor's heads spinning. In fact, after so much time spent staring at these familiar-but-foreign terms and conditions, I felt completely incompetent and drained (as any kick to the ol' pride will do).