<p>Frazzled, not that long ago, UC San Diego Admissions somehow programmed their system wrong and, yes, sent out acceptances to a LARGE number of students who should not have received them. The error was discovered quickly and it was a mess to straighten out, egg on the face of the school, unhappy students, the whole ten yards.</p>
<p>“what would happen if someone grabbed the wrong pile and sent acceptances to the rejected kids?”</p>
<p>When I was working in the admissions office, an international student called to ask why she had received a rejection letter weeks after being accepted. She had not been accepted, so we asked her to fax us the “acceptance” she had received. It was a (pretty poorly done) hoax. Someone had apparently decided to play a trick on her and sent her this fake acceptance letter. It was obviously written by someone who spoke English as a second language, but the student hadn’t suspected anything was wrong. We had to tell her that it was not genuine and that someone else had to have sent it to her. Very difficult.</p>
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Now that would be shocking since at some of these schools the rejected pile is more than 9 times as large as the accepted pile! :)</p>