Once in our CS department (not CMU), we had given PhD acceptance to a wrong student (call him Student2) since he carried the same name+surname with the candidate we intended to admit (call him Student1).
Instead of rescinding the acceptance, we let Student2 join. Of course we also admitted Student1 to the department as well.
It turned out that Student2 (the candidate we admitted by mistake) performed much better than Student1. :-)
I remember when I was applying to graduate schools I was waiting to go to my last (fourth) recruitment interview, but I was pretty sure I wanted to go to the third school I had visited. Well I wasn't back for more than a day from the last recruitment trip when I called up that third school to ask them when I should show up and what paperwork I needed to fill out... it wasn't until about two years later that I realized I couldn't remember receiving an official acceptance letter or phone call from them...
As an aside -- I have always found this type of sentence formulation, common with software engineers, so mystifying. It would be just as easy to understand without the sentence variables -- it doesn't add clarity but it does add length.
The alternative:
> Once in our CS department (not CMU), we had given PhD acceptance to a wrong student, since he carried the same name+surname with the candidate we intended to admit.
> Instead of rescinding the acceptance, we let both join.
It turned out that the candidate we admitted by mistake performed much better than the other. :-)
In support of the variables, the comments seem to leverage Student1 and Student2 to describe the students the commenters are referring too, which is a lot easier than having to reexplain who you're referring to. (edit: DRY principle)
One doesn't always know whether the structure of the prose they are about to produce will permit discernment of its subjects by context and description alone.
That is to say, in informal communications, an intuitive notation such as "[class][index]" can easily map between an abstract thought and its textual representation, without a critical re-reading on the part of the author to ensure the subjects are properly differentiated, potentially followed by subtle sentence refactoring.
It's a style you also see quite frequently in legal documents where you first introduce the parties, give them a shorthand name and then use that name consistently throughout the document. I personally prefer that style over endless repetition of a description (with possible inconsistencies between the repetitions).
To some of you reading this who haven't been to graduate school, this mistake is not as large as you might think. A lot of graduate schools have the policy of overadmitting and then pruning out during the oral exam (which usually 1-2 years into the program). I do not know if CMU is one of those schools (I attended one which did not have this policy; also, this policy can vary by department within the same school).
Also reminds me of the movie Orange County, where main character Shaun Brumder does not get admitted to Stanford because they mistakenly admit classmate and stoner Shane Brainard instead. Hilarity ensues.
Wasn't there once some sort of experiment of admitting a random sample from a college application pool? Couldn't find it on the spot, but I think it had some similar results to the PhD admission experience. It also does make sense from a armchair psychologist standpoint: The one being admitted on weak grounds will probably put in a lot more effort to keep up with the class/competitors than the one having always some other, similar options to fall back on.
A third degree friend of mine resigned from her job as soon as she received acceptance mail. She received rejection mail in the morning & was devasted. As depressing as it could get.
Oh. My. That's going to be a mess. Some people will have quit their jobs, turned in notice, etc. CMU might want to be prepared to reaccept some of those people.
You can't reasonably expect to be rejected /after/ being accepted though. Resigning when you apply, chickens not hatched yet. Get a letter from the program you applied to informing you of your acceptance, that's a pretty hatched chicken.
Perhaps I should have just said don't burn your bridges? It's not strictly necessary to quit in a way that can't be unquit immediately upon receipt of an acceptance letter.
can't reply to tedunangst but it doesn't matter how you do it, you can't "unquit" once your employer knows you've been applying elsewhere, no matter if it's for school or another job.
Keyword being immediately. Waiting 24 hours from acceptance notification to quitting doesn't seem entirely unreasonable. One may not expect to be unaccepted, but a little prudence rarely hurts in the event of the unexpected.
That said, it certainly is possible to unquit at many employers provided you didn't quit by taking off your pants and running out the door shouting "adios, motherfuckers."
I don't know why you think you can't in general. If you're on good terms and quit on good terms I would expect most places you could undo it once you explained the situation. I know for a fact that I could at my employer.
Ugh, this apology seems lamely antiseptic. "We are reviewing our notification procedures" is not the level of self-abasement I would expect after a mistake this serious.
If the email comes from a school employee then that may be enough to make it legally binding. But even if it isn't, if you threaten to sue the school will almost always let you in. This sort of thing happens all the time, e.g. from coaches who tell athletes they are accepted before the admissions committee officially makes a decision, and the reason you never hear about lawsuits is because the schools almost always let the candidates in if they complain in order to prevent bad publicity.
I don't understand, wouldn't the law account for honest mistakes if you corrected them in a timely fashion (e.g. before anyone relied upon the notification, resulting in actual harm)? Why would a mistake like this be legally binding?
This is exactly what I'm talking about. No one knows what each other is talking about when saying "UW". Looking at chris_va's profile, it appears he was talking about the University of Washington. Most of the US probably thinks of UW that way, though in Silicon Valley I've met a lot more people from the University of Waterloo than from the University of Washington.
Instead of rescinding the acceptance, we let Student2 join. Of course we also admitted Student1 to the department as well.
It turned out that Student2 (the candidate we admitted by mistake) performed much better than Student1. :-)
Regehr notes a similar observation. http://blog.regehr.org/archives/147