UC San Diego mistakenly congratulated nearly 29,000 applicants
 

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca...Out.html?yhp=1

Oops! UCSD Sends Acceptance E-mail to Wrong List
University Fails Basic Math, Gives Rejectees Hope
By ERIC S. PAGE
Updated 11:32 AM PDT, Wed, Apr 1, 2009

UC San Diego -- a school for the smart ones, supposedly -- mistakenly congratulated nearly 29,000 applicants on their acceptance, according to university officials.arlier this month, about 17,000 students were offered admission for the fall, leaving nearly 29,000 hopefuls out in the cold.

But on Tuesday, the school's communications office said an e-mail was sent Monday afternoon to all 46,377 students who applied for admission -- including the 29,000 rejects -- welcoming them to the campus.
A half-hour later, school officials said, they realized their mistake. Almost two hours after the first note went out, a second e-mail was sent, apologizing to 28,889 freshmen applicants for the mistake.

Go to link to read the rest^^

I saw a report on this on the Today show this morning and the article isn't completely clear. It's not as though they received acceptance letters from the school. They all received rejection letters and then received an email inviting them to Admit Day - a day to visit the campus after you've been accepted. Then two hours later the previously rejected students received the apology for the mistake.

Still a massive screw up, but it's not like they received an acceptance and then later the school was like "oops, just kidding". The kid who was featured in the story was talking about how humiliating it was for him to be embarrassed in front of his family, etc, etc. I was just wondering why he would go on the TODAY SHOW if he was so embarrassed and humiliated by the situation. I'm counting the days until that kid finds an attorney to file some bogus lawsuit against the school.

I think this is awesome, and should become a staple for American colleges on April Fool's day. Keep those dunces on their toes.

Was he not embarrassed the first time when he got the actual letter in the mail? Does he mean to tell us that this was the first blow?:rolleyes:

Didn't Cornell do something like this a few years ago?

Yes. It's mentioned in the article.

its times like these it makes me THRILLED to already be in college!

UNC law school did this recently as well. They blamed it on an email system that uses tags.

http://www.abovethelaw.com/2009/03/s...ises_hopes.php

To be rejected from UCSD is not something to be embarrassed about. It's one of the best UC schools and definitely a challenge to get in.

And thrilled to have applied to college in a time when acceptance and rejection letters were only sent by mail, in a letter on school letterhead! There's just too much potential for these mistakes with email.

You know you got accepted to a school by the size of the package. If it was just a letter, it's usually rejection letter. If it's huge, it's an acceptance letter with crap of packages.

Right, but these days a lot of colleges are sending out rejection/acceptance emails, only followed by hard copy packets to accepted students. An email just seems so anticlimactic to me. I kept all of my acceptance letters.

I could log in and check online before I got any sort of letter. I know I found out about UCSC online and then got my letter a bit later. I think I got rejected from UCD online but I don't remember a letter.

It is still lame of UCSD to have regret email leaks. They may need not to leak that kind of email and make it check-in only, telling folks it is their responsibility to check their account, etc. The $35 application fee or whatever it is now, needs to go toward their little e-account set up for the applicant's admission...

Just like the IRS says, if you don't print out your receipt, it is your fault and you may still owe us...

Interestingly, I have one student right now who applied to a lot of highly selective colleges and is hearing back with a mixture of acceptances and rejections. She's been updating the class with a ranking of how schools handle the rejection letters. (She's a really funny kid.) One, according to her, managed to be doubly insulting (something about how it suggested that some people manage to do okay in life without attending an Ivy League school at all didn't strike the right tone) while one of the west coast schools, sent an email that she credited as being really "classy." One of the things she liked about it was that they noted in the email that since it was bad news they weren't going to follow up with anything in the mail. She liked that.

So maybe the key is to send an email for rejection by something tangible for acceptances.