UNC to would-be students: You're in! No, you're not

Computerworld - About 2,700 applicants for fall 2007 admission to UNC-Chapel Hill were notified via e-mail on Tuesday that they had been accepted to the university, according to a statement on the university's Web site. The problem is that the e-mail was sent by mistake.

In fact, decisions on the applications from those students have not yet been made, and the students were not expecting an answer until March 31, according to the school.

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions said two simultaneous human errors involving e-mail messages were to blame for the errant messages, and admissions staff began apologizing to applicants the next day. "We are still mortified that this happened," Stephen Farmer, assistant provost and director of undergraduate admissions, said in the statement yesterday. "I hate that it happened. We try to make sure the candidates under our care are treated fairly and humanely, and it's heartbreaking in this case there were 2,700 students we've failed."

Farmer said that he had heard from about 100 of the students and that the majority had been "just amazingly gracious -- almost all said they understood it was an error."

According to an explanation posted on the admissions office Web site, at 3:50 p.m. on Jan. 23, the office mistakenly sent e-mails requesting midyear grades from applicants. However, the e-mail also said, "Congratulations again on your admission to the University."

Apparently a staff member used the wrong distribution list for the midyear grade request, Farmer said in the statement. Within a span of five minutes, another staffer, apparently independently, modified the original message to include congratulations on acceptance.

Farmer said that the mistake was discovered almost immediately and that the staff tried to delete the messages. Initially, the university thought the errant e-mail had been sent to only 500 students. The next day, it learned that the total number of students affected was 2,703 -- 773 of them in North Carolina, the rest from out of state.

The admissions office said it is developing internal controls to prevent the error from recurring.

"While our official admissions decisions are communicated only through mail and through students' UNC home pages, we understand that many of the students who received the mistaken message have been disappointed to learn that we have reached no decision regarding their candidacy," Farmer said. "We deeply regret this disappointment, which we know is compounded by the stress and anxiety that students experience as a result of the admissions process."

A spokeswoman for the admissions office said the office had no comment beyond its online statement (download PDF).

Read more about Security in Computerworld's Security Topic Center.