Test 2

Yikes:

The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg admitted nearly 700 applicants in recent days, but human error is being blamed for more than 400 of those admissions offers having been sent out incorrectly. They have since been revoked.

The university issued this statement: “We were dismayed to learn about the acceptance emails that were mistakenly sent Saturday due to human error. All of us work in higher education because we care about students, and we understand the confusion and distress a mistake like this can cause. As soon as we found out about the situation, we immediately reviewed our process for communicating with prospective students and have changed our procedures to prevent this from happening again. In addition, our staff is calling each of the affected students to apologize and discuss their application status. They hope to contact all of the students by the end of this week.”

In my work, one of my responsibilities is the oversight of the release of admission decisions. At Penn State, the Undergraduate Admissions Office processes thousands of admission decisions - particularly this time of the year. We have measures in place to ensure that decisions are checked and re-checked so that erroneous admission decisions don't ever get out. But there is always a non-zero-percent-chance that mistakes in decision-making can get through our quality assurance processes. It's not uncommon for me and my colleagues to lose a few hours of sleep questioning whether or not we have dotted all of the proverbial Is and crossed of the proverbial Ts. But, from my perspective it could be much, much worse. My worst fears at Penn State would add an additional zero to USF's 400 mistaken admission decisions.

I feel for the folks at USF @ St. Petersburg, I really do. For what it's worth, they are taking the right tack. Owning the error and apologizing for it is the right thing to do - even if it will be painful for a while.