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Carnegie-Mellon Sends Hundreds of Acceptance Letters By Mistake
An anonymous reader writes As reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Carnegie-Mellon University mistakenly sent 800 acceptances for its Master of Science in Computer Science program. They're not saying "computer error," but what are the other explanations? High irony all around. The program accepts fewer than nine percent of more than 1,200 applicants, which places the acceptance level at about a hundred, so they're bad at math, too.
censored version of die hard on TV
I'm a PhD in CompSci, not a software engineer!
Imagine their disappointment when they only get an apology and no scholarship! The emotional damages must cost millions.
I suspect those that turned down other university offers for this one, only to find out they weren't accepted and no have no-where to go have basis for a lawsuit. And what about those that had scholarships at other schools and lost them? Mistakes like this, and such a critical point in your life, affect the whole of the rest of your life. It could change the entire trajectory of your career.
They were informed of the acceptance by email, and the error by email a few hours later. The university could do something positive for those rejected by helping them get into a similar program at another university.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Come on baby! make it hurt so good!
sorry, blame my dendrite that reached over to the 80's section
It already did something positive: It saved them from a useless degree.
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Why the hell should they offer anything? It was a mistake, tough luck. Why does the topic of compensation come up for every simple mistake these days?
So what if you were disappointed - welcome to the real world, sometimes your hopes are dashed after being raised.
Submitter can't be so dim that "human error" doesn't occur to him, can he?
(Females in the 21st century are too sainted to make this kind of mistake...)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Reminds me of an experience I had with a university. I had submitted an application for a scholarship. Some time later, I received a letter saying they were missing some piece of information that I had to mail back before they could continue processing my application. A few days passed, and before I mailed in the information, I received a second letter saying that they now had all the information they required, so I didn't bother mailing it.
Weeks passed with no updates. After the deadline for when they were supposed to have gotten back to me came and went, I called them up, and guess what? They couldn't complete my application due to missing information. The same information that they'd requested in the first letter, but which I didn't send in because the follow-up letter had stated that they had all the information. It really pissed me off.
"Computer errors" in these situations usually mean a human entered data incorrectly or someone pushed the wrong button; not that a software bug turned 600 rejections into acceptance.
As HAL said: It can only be attributable to human error.
FUCK YOU, Rob, you sad McJob manager! I just got into Carnegie-Mellon's CS program for grad school! So you can SUCK MY DICK, Rob! And that goes for you too Stacey! This motherfucker right here is GOING PLACES, BITCH! So you can shove this smock right up your tight asses! And don't look to see me again, 'cause I'm going to be in Pittsburg getting my Masters on!
Oh look, I just got another letter from them. Must be to congratulate me AGAIN! Let's open it up, so I can shove it right in your FAT FACES!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
When I applied there for undergraduate, I was sent two rejection letters, four months apart.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
If you want to make 80K a year in CS or IT in general, you don't have to graduate from C-M to do it.
If you want to work at Google or someplace like that, it may be somewhat more helpful.
If the applicant is seriously underqualified and likely to fail, they should say so, give the specific reasons, and advise them not to enter the program.
Nevertheless, if they've actually sent out an acceptance--if it wasn't a forgery--they should honor the acceptance.
It's the right thing to do.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why are we turning away applicants when MILLIONS (no citations provided) of STEM jobs remain unfilled? We just need MORE STEM graduates to stay competitive (no citation provided). Schools are turning away qualified and motivated applicants just to fill affirmative action quotas (No citation provided). We must do something! Think of the children[1]!
(In case you missed it that was sarcasm)
[1] Disclaimer; proper health care, nutrition, primary and secondary not included.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
CMU isn't going to do anything about this to those affected by this mistake. Their accrediting agency, Middle States Commission on Higher Education, http://www.msche.org/ will make you jump through numerous hoops before doing nothing. If you can get them to pony up a t-shirt, you'll be doing well. Take the t-shirt and move on to Plan B.
In twelve easy steps!
Accept all 800 students in a newly established online degree program. Inform those who successfully achieve an 3.75 their first year will be granted acceptance onto the campus.
Depends on the actual harm. I doubt your story of how you told the 7-11 to go fuck themselves once you got into C-M is going to get much sympathy in court. That just sounds like you burned bridges unnecessarily. Besides, there are tons of shit jobs out there, as long as you don't want to make a career out of them.
As the article said, however, if you were accepted elsewhere prestigious and declined their offer, and now you had no place to go in the fall, that's something that represents real harm. In that case, you have to accept either waiting a semester or a whole year to reapply to the other school, or you have to accept going to a less prestigious school, which would have longer term effects.
You could then additionally argue (without mentioning any burned bridges) that a year of waiting to try again (and possibly failing the second time around) would represent a hardship financially as well, but that is less persuasive because going to grad school costs money, it doesn't make you money. You could get TA jobs and grad living arrangements, of course, but it's not like being a grad student is actually more lucrative in the short term than being a pizza delivery person who lives with their parents for another year.
Nope. Google does not care about the useless "where you went to school" nonsense.
They want to know you have skills and abilities. Show up with a brilliant invention under your arm and they will gladly take an ITT Tech graduate.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Nope. Google does not care about the useless "where you went to school" nonsense.
I don't believe that for a second. It might not be of primary concern but I have zero doubt that if you went to MIT or Carnegie Mellon and graduated with an IT related degree, it WILL factor into the hiring decision at Google.
They want to know you have skills and abilities.
Of course they do. That's precisely why they care whether or not you graduated from a known good training program. It is evidence that you are likely to have the sort of skills they are looking for. They'll test you further but it is a piece of evidence.
Show up with a brilliant invention under your arm and they will gladly take an ITT Tech graduate.
Perhaps but since that doesn't happen very often where you went to school WILL get looked at.
They're not saying "computer error," but what are the other explanations?
There is no such thing as a computer error. Either it was user error or the computer was programmed improperly or the computer's hardware was designed/built improperly. ALL of those are human errors. Computers do exactly what they are told to do. Nothing more, nothing less. If the instructions are faulty then the computer will execute those faulty instructions faithfully.
They haven't been to school yet. The best lawyers they can get are probably just what you can find using Google.
... but it's not like being a grad student is actually more lucrative in the short term than being a pizza delivery person who lives with their parents for another year.
Maybe the parents should be the ones suing.
The problem with the burned bridges "tough luck" is that, as you say, you may have declined another grad school opportunity. In that case, I think CMU has responsibility for the situation and should work with the other school to make sure the applicant gets in somewhere.
Being a grad student isn't more lucrative than pizza delivery, on the whole, However, it advances one's career much more, and so having to wait another year is simply cutting a year out of the applicant's professional life.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There's an easy solution: Let them all in and flunk 90%. Added benefit: You retain only those who can handle the heat.
Wrong acceptance email happens every year (watch for them from March through April). Often at private K-12 schools, but also at colleges as well.
It has nothing to do with nefarious plots; and it doesn't take an especially stupid person.
Here's a few obvious reasons::
The programs are only run live once a year. An annual relearning exercise
"Accepted Applicants" and "All Applicants" reside in the same database. It's easy to export the wrong selection.
The staff changes from year to year
Often the admissions department is a small staff with minimal computer experience.
New software, and, especially, new office routines come along during the year.
Admissions departments worry about applicants; not aboutsoftware testing and deployment issues
Around this time, admissions people are under serious pressure from all sides to finish - pestered by parents, administration, and applicants.
Correct notification of applicants isn't considered mission-critical by admissions ("Hey - we goofed, so we'll just send out another email.")
Brittle Millenials are crying millions of tears.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"The program accepts fewer than nine percent of more than 1,200 applicants, which places the acceptance level at about a hundred, so they're bad at math, too."
Does this joke depend on some fact in TFA? (Which i am unable to read at work.) Are they actually supposed to be accepting some number that is significantly higher or lower than 100? As it is that statement stands out as a total non-sequitur.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Wow must be a different company named Google that I'm competing against when I hire at CMU. Looking at the info for 2013 Google hired 19 CS undergrads from CMU. http://www.cmu.edu/career/sala... In fact, in 2013 Google was the number one employer or CS undergrads that responded to the survey outpacing Microsoft by 50%. (19 to 13). I know this is the grad program but to say Google doesn't care about "where you went to school" shows complete ignorance of the hyper competitive environment for recruiting CS grads from top CS schools.
Nope. You can probabaly get an 80K a year job in CS with a degree someplace else. However using the 2013 survey numbers ( http://www.cmu.edu/career/sala... ) Undergard CS majors had a mean salary of $94,544 . Grads data is a bit more sporadic because of the multiple majors, but VLIS was $107,333 and Software Engineering was $94,125. Considering your starting salary out of college has a major impact on your long-term earnings there is a compelling argument to be made that it has a major impact on your long-term $ earned: http://www.businessinsider.com...
I simple mistake? Sending out 800 acceptance letters for 100 spots? That a more than a simple mistake. Guess you failed reading comprehension.
When I was in college, I was only on partial scholarships and (this was before the days of online payments; the bursar figured out payments by hand in front of me) so I had to go to the bursar's office, check in hand, and pay my tuition once a month per my contract.
Well, the bursar got the number wrong one month. I owed a couple hundred more dollars more, plus what I hadn't paid the previous month. I, being about 19, pouted, whined and expressed my quiet outrage to the person taking my check. After all, it was the office's mistake. Why should I have to pay out of my budgeted expenses when your office failed to crank the numbers out right?
Turns out, I ended up paying the balance anyway. Why? It was a pointless battle I wasn't going to win.
Moral of the story is, sometimes things don't go your way in life. If you were any way hurt because one college "took it back", you might have been a sheltered kid that's not used to rejection and people making mistakes. It happens. Mistakes will happen. You may have a bad relationship that screws up your life plan for having kids by 30, you may be diagnosed with ALS and not get to live to whatever full potential you envisioned for yourself, the economy may tank and your dream job disappears when the bubble bursts on your industry.
At some point, you have to accept the fact that things aren't always going to go your way. Nobody owes you anything when that happens.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Depends on how good lawyers they have
This. There is also an element of randomness, but the quality of the lawyers matters a lot.
If there was no language or contract saying otherwise, then the school's offer created a power of acceptance among the students at the least, and anyone who told the school they would go in that time now has a contract with the school.
If there were early decision applicants, then the school's acceptance likewise created the contract.
Finally, if there were students who materially changed their position in reasonable reliance on the acceptance, they likely also have a contract.
This one hits a bit close to home for me. I'm actually just finishing up my PhD in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. Within a month, I should be Doctor Atog. Getting an acceptance letter like that can be life-changing. I've spent the past six years of my life in Pittsburgh because of being accepted to CMU. This has been an amazing place and I feel very fortunate for the opportunity to have been here. I've had doors opened because of being here, and I've been able to have some very rewarding experiences. I've learned a lot and I've certainly grown as a person. I still remember first getting that acceptance from CMU. I was overjoyed, and I knew that my future would be different because of that acceptance.
The students getting these false acceptance letters had several hours before there was a correction. Those hours are a lot of time. That is enough time to tell present employers that they are quitting. Enough to tell friends and family the good news. Time enough to tell other schools that they are retracting their applications. In other words, lots of time to make some fairly hefty life-altering decisions based on the news.
You'll have to hire some new professors but it will all work out.
What's the "value" of a college degree from CM? That should be the penalty, lifetime "value" of a CM degree, vs a High School graduate.
These days, if a person makes an error, they are held to it forever, but a corporation makes an error, and they make a non-apology and fight any consequences
Learn to love Alaska
Let's be clear. I didn't say Google itself cared. I said it might be somewhat more useful to go to C-M if you wanted to work at Google. That's different.
Google has a Pittsburgh office whose opening was motivated, in part, due to close ties with C-M. Also due to the high quality of IT candidates in that area, which is also a side effect of C-M.
They may not have a requirement that you have that name on your diploma, but there is close proximity to that Google office, and C-M has very good outreach and an excellent reputation.
There are also a fair number of C-M grads there. That ensures that there is a level of familiarity with the C-M program and the definite possibility of networking. All useful in obtaining a job out of school.
Finally, if you go to a school like that, you're honestly a lot more likely to engage in projects and hobbies that would interest Google. They have the labs, the faculty, and the environment that helps with that. Same goes for an MIT or a Berkeley.
Chances are good that going to C-M is an advantage if your goal is to work at a Google (or Apple or Microsoft for that matter). Schools like that don't just rely on the strength of their name for placement.
Do you have to be smart or have done something to impress Google? Sure. There are no guarantees about placement anywhere where there is a huge line at the front door.
However, if I was selecting a school to go to, with an eye towards having an edge towards making myself more attractive, that would be one of the schools that I'd have on my list.
The point is, making 80k is relatively easy and you don't need a C-M degree or even a degree to make that in IT. That's not why you go to C-M. You go to places like that to take advantage of its particular opportunities to improve your game as a CS person and that can get you where you need to be to be marketable to the top places to work.