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I would fire my IT people for creating a system that allowed this to happen. This is something that absolutely cannot happen. Of course, if I was in charge they would know this in advance.</p>
<p>As for recompense for the 76–what about this–what if Vassar offered them admission, but in the fall of 2013, if they did not enroll in another college in 2012. They would also be free to accept other colleges RD. I’ll bet that this would result in a lot less than 76 of them enrolling.</p>
<p>Hunt - you and no company in this world could afford that kind of IT. That kind of performance would be expected of trading systems, and IBs throw millions at it, and those systems still go down.</p>
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<p>In short, it’s always IT’s fault…even if it is proven the fault laid with the pointy-haired senior end-user who specifically told IT to implement the system the way it was and dismissed all of their concerns about possible failures. </p>
<p>I’m not so sure about that…especially considering we’re talking about an environment where the end-users are like many non-technically heavy institutional environments where non-techies are the key decisionmakers on everything and IT must carry out their orders…however foolhardy they may be because they tend to be stuck on the bottom rung of the institutional/corporate hierarchy.</p>
<p>Oldfort, looks like we both cross-posted. :)</p>
<p>It seems to me that there are some specific things that you will insist that your IT build strong safeguards for–and if they don’t, heads will roll. Security of private data is probably the key example. But for a college admissions office, sending out false positive admissions decisions would be up there.</p>
<p>Maybe I wouldn’t fire the whole IT department, because I’m a magnanimous person. But this would be a big, big deal and a massive failure for IT.</p>
<p>I think the question is: whose idea was it to use the “admit” letter as a placeholder? I doubt that was someone in IT. Even if you designed a system that asked the user in admissions, “Has this person been accepted?” every time they tried to post the “admit” letter, that safeguard could easily be circumvented by a person in admissions. The admissions people have to have the capability to post the decision letters.</p>
<p>What is pointy hair? </p>
<p>The reason this fascinates is because it seems to confirm applicants’ fears that they pour out their lives and dreams to admissions officers and in the end it’s all very casual to those in power. No biggie.</p>
<p>I think you make a very good point, Snowdog. </p>
<p>And I am not sure what pointy hair is.</p>
<p>I think pointy hair is reference to the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert.</p>
<p>Here’s wikipedia’s take on “Pointy-haired boss”:</p>
<p>[Pointy-haired</a> Boss - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss]Pointy-haired”>List of Dilbert characters - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>I tend to use that term to describe bosses with little/no working knowledge of certain areas…yet have key decisionmaking power that trumps those who do.</p>
<p>Considering this is common enough…especially in many non-tech heavy institutions…it wouldn’t be surprising if the pointy-haired boss syndrome was the cause of this screwup at Vassar College.</p>
<p>Count me in the group surprised Vassar didn’t accept the 76. I think they should have and never should have admitted the mistake. Since we pretty much agree that there isn’t that much fairness in elite college admissions, and that a class could be filled with comparable students several times over, what is the problem? Why defend Vassar?</p>
<p>This seems to happen occasionally. What if it happens regularly and most colleges just accept the students and say nothing. What if all our kids were mistakenly accepted to their colleges? :)</p>
<p>If Vassar had done this to anyone in my family… I’d be absolutely ballistic. I am really glad no nieces/nephews had applications in there. My post would be much different.</p>
<p>. . . ohhhh, alh, mistaken acceptances! That could explain a lot, in our household! :)</p>
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<p>You mean lie on the CDS? How would Vassar explain that 80-90 percent of the ED applicants were admitted?</p>
<p>The facts would eventually be discovered…as Claremont McKenna College just learned.</p>
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<p>[Claremont</a> McKenna College Administrator Admits To Submitting False SAT Scores To Publications](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost)</p>
<p>^^90 percent admit rate - well yes a problem there :)</p>
<p>But they would never have to say which students were mistakenly admitted, would they?</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>I can’t imagine that some loose-lip employee in admissions or IT wouldn’t blab the facts.</p>
<p>Heck, individuals I know who work at Vassar and Smith have in the course of casual conversation informed me of things I’m not so sure I should know.</p>
<p>However, even if admissions and IT would blab… I still think the 76 should be accepted and their identities protected as much as possible. Perhaps, as suggested, these were deferrals, some of whom would have been accepted in regular round admissions. I guess it isn’t a big deal to state that. </p>
<p>My main point is … Vassar shouldn’t rescind an acceptance just because they ****ed up.</p>
<p>Here’s a possible scenario, given the likelihood that oldfort is right about the limited IT resources available at a small school such as Vassar. IT guy/gal says, “We need to test this system. We recommend a dummy message.” User in admissions puts the acceptance message in as the test. In this scenario, who is at fault? Clearly not the IT team. It’s not likely the IT team would have had access to or taken the time to write a mock acceptance letter! The IT team would have written something like, “TEST TEST TEST”; that’s about as creative as I’ve ever seen a programmer get! 
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<p>The way I see it, what the administration SHOULD have done is more or less what they got around to doing. A more agile response over the weekend would have been nice; maybe now their communication/PR team knows better. But what they COULD have done, to continue the tradition of “pioneering achievements in education” that they highlight on their “About Vassar College” statement, is let those students in. Sure, it would have been problematic in a thousand different ways. But it would also have been bold and in keeping with the school’s history: “The historical fact that best explains Vassars character is that the college was founded in defiance of conventional wisdom.” (From [Vassar</a> College || About](<a href=“http://admissions.vassar.edu/about.html]Vassar”>http://admissions.vassar.edu/about.html))</p>
<p>One thought I had, to muddy the water even more–when my daughter got her early admission at another school, they included a statement that they reserved the right to rescind admission for certain reasons–such as low grades, crime, etc. I wonder if Vassar had such a list, and if it included a mistake like this as one of the reasons.</p>
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<p>LOL- My daughter works at a tech startup. I talked to her about the issue. She informed me the IT guys/gals use Latin when testing. But, then again, almost all the employees are MIT or top LAC alums, so it figures they’d try to be cute.</p>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet . . .
The standard text filler.
I once spent longer than I’d care to admit attempting to translate it.
Apparently, it’s scrambled Cicero.</p>
<p>Oh wow, they are talking this on “The View” right now.</p>