Computer Glitches at Wash U. Grrr....

Parent Cafe
1

<p>A comment and an observation.....</p>

<p>For the last three hours I've been posting intermittently on this site (unable to sleeep) and watching a problem developing in the Wash U forum. A considerable number of students checked into their Wash U accounts after midnight and discovered they now had a button that said this: </p>

<p>
[quote]
Wait List Response</p>

<p>Our records indicate that as of 2006-03-17:</p>

<p>We have not received notification from you about remaining on the wait list.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>None of these students had received any prior notice of acceptance, waitlist, or rejection from the school. Additionally, it appears that other students who were accepted "early" (and there were a number of these) had no such button in their accounts.</p>

<p>Something like this just shouldn't happen. Either the button means what it says and the students should have been notified by e-mail or letter, or else it is just a huge computer gaffe that someone should correct. My guess is that the former is probably true.</p>

<p>I know that Wash U isn't the only school that's had these type of problems. For ED I at Emory this year, the kids could log onto their accounts and tell from the changes in the buttons that they had probably been accepted long before any acceptance letter arrived. Conversely, those students who didn't get the new buttons spent many days worrying over why they didn't have them. </p>

<p>If schools have the technology to create these computer accounts, why don't they have the foresight and courtesy to make sure students are officially notified in an appropriate manner instead of finding out by some crazy button on a website. Surely they understand that students communicate with each other on websites and elsewhere, and that a change in an account will be immediately noted. Maybe in the future there needs to be better communication between the website people and the admissions staff. Students often have so much of their identity tied up in the application process that oversights like these can be even more painful than a straightforward rejection letter. (Let's face it...at Wash U, a waitlist is virtually the equivalent of a rejection given the numbers involved.)</p>

2

<p>That is unfortunate, Cami. I agree that schools that make decisions available online need to take better measures to ensure that the technology works properly. FWIW, the same thing happened last spring with transfer decisions. A short message along the lines of “We have not received a resonse to our offer of admission” appeared on my D's Wash U account a day or so before the formal admission decision was accessible. We chalked it up to a glitch in the transfer admissions process, which generally runs somewhat more erratically than the regular admissions process.</p>

3

<p>MIT had a problem last year with snail mail - the acceptance packages were inadvertantly mailed before the wl's / denies. This year they have an online option, and I hope their servers handle the load gracefully.</p>