<p>Oops. </p>
<p>Wow…these mistakes could be huge…what if a wrongly-accepted student had then cancelled his other applications?</p>
<p>Well, in this case the mistake was clearly NOT an acceptance e-mail, just an e-mail that was directed to students who had previously been accepted (telling them to buy Hopkins gear for Christmas), almost everyone who got it had previously received an unambigious rejection from the admissions office, and the mistake was uncorrected for about two hours on a Sunday afternoon. So I am not too worried about anyone pulling all their applications. About 290 students got the e-mail who shouldn’t have – which is 1% of the 28,000 students UCSD mistakenly sent actual acceptance notices to one year, and the world didn’t come to an end then, either.</p>
<p>I’m glad it didn’t happen to my kids, of course. High school seniors sort of feel like they are little targets in a shooting gallery sometimes, and the last thing they need is more things that hurt.</p>
<p>These sorts of things are unfortunate but inevitable in this age of technology. This is a very tough time for seniors. Thankfully my D got good news but says she really can’t celebrate since so many of her friends did not. I hadn’t heard about the UCSD mistake but that is awful.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I disagree. Why would Hopkins put a contractor on this? Why is the list not triple-checked before hitting send?</p>
<p>IMO, such things are 'inevitable" due to laziness of Adcoms.</p>
<p>Think that would be the responsibility of the tech department no? Not sure Adcoms have much to do with this sort of thing. Think they have enough on their plate this time of year.</p>
<p>Man, this is a PR nightmare. It’s getting tons of coverage. They expect the kids to triple check their applications…no typos, perfect grammar, etc. Yet, they mess up big time. Sorry, there’s no excuse when you’re one of the leading institutions in the country. Doesn’t matter if it has happened before. If anything, that should make all schools more careful. Have to say, the kids posting on the jhu thread who were rejected and received these emails have me LMAO with their witty sarcasm. And I read the post on ABC that included a funny tweet by one of the kids involved. I’m thankfully done living through my kids’ college admissions, but as a mom, my heart goes out to these kids. It’s not fun getting played, even if it was unintentional. As the kid in the tweet on ABC said, he got tr*lled hard.</p>
<p>UCSD was a far bigger “oops”…</p>
<p>Our school district has a law firm handling files on special education students ( probably ones that are suing the ditrict for non compliance)
Anyway- a guardian, requested info so as to assist his sister, and the law firm forwarded him unredacted records of 8000 students.
Sounds like their complete histories.
ID #s, grades, family histories, birth dates…</p>
<p>This is an indication of a school living off its “glory” days… Shows apathy and a poor sense of quality in execution;
imagine dealing with this type of gaffes for the next 4 years.</p>
<p>I think it may have been the school’s bookstore (a contractor) trying to get a list for advertising. Just a mistake to give them the entire list of applicants and not take out those rejected.</p>
<p>I realize that mistakes happen, but so many emotions running high for these HS seniors (and their parents!). This has to be tough.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Perhaps, but the bookstore does not easily obtain a list of applicants. A full time employee had to send over the file. Or a full time employee had to build the electronic feed to send over the electronic file. An adult is responsible here. Period.</p>
<p>I can’t tell you how much the possibility of this sort of thing haunts my days. It is not all the unimaginable that such a mistake can occur. Computers do things behind the scenes, and that can allow things to get through that a person might have caught … and then there is my situation, where EVERYTHING is manual, and the sheer amount of work at certain moments in time can allow this sort of thing to slip past even my very-vigilant eyes. </p>
<p>True, though, that this is more confusing than it is horrific for the students. If they had already been turned down, and if it’s not a letter saying, “Congratulations, we changed our minds,” then I would think that confusion would be the order of the day.</p>
<p>This is terrible, but was bound to happen at some point. Hopefully, this will serve as a reminder to other schools that they need to be exceedingly diligent with sending out admission/rejection emails.</p>
<p>It seems to me that if you are running an admissions office, this is something that ABSOLUTELY CANNOT HAPPEN and everybody working for you should understand that very clearly. So if it happens, somebody needs to face some consequences. As to what the students should get, in my opinion they should at least get a refund of their application fee, because they didn’t get what they paid for, a professional processing of their applications.</p>
<p>I just made a bad mistake myself on the computer - mistakenly sent out the wrong version of an engineering drawing and it was used for construction. ARGH!! That is also something that absolutely cannot happen, but it did. 
I have to come up with a fail-safe way to avoid that in the future.</p>
<p>This also happens because everyone thinks computers are “infallible”. Well, in a sense they nearly are but the people doing the programming and selecting the program parameters are not. Anyway, my point is that we have lost sight of quality control checks because of this mistaken belief. Presumably a random checking of the names on the list would have turned up a few of the mistakes and caught it before it went out.</p>
<p>I think that the Common App should require all members to make full refunds if incorrect admission info is sent to a student. </p>
<p>I agree that a school should have consequences for things like this. Return of app fee would be a good start.</p>