Approximately 200 prospective Miami University students faced some confusion at the beginning of March over their acceptance status into the Middletown and Hamilton campus' nursing program due to a "simple human error."
According to Paulette Worcester, director of the Hamilton and Middletown campus nursing departments, 211 letters containing the nursing program's decision for acceptance were erroneously mailed to the wrong applicants Friday, March 9.
Both the names of the individuals to whom the letters were mailed, as well as the verdict on their acceptance, were incorrectly given.
She said that at some point during the process of assembling data about the 244 students who applied for the program, an error occurred, causing the database containing the information to scramble everyone's names and addresses.
As a result, students received confusing letters addressed to a name other than their own, mistakenly telling them that they were either accepted, denied, or they didn't meet requirements for acceptance into the program.
The reaction from applicants was immediate, and from the moment that the error was discovered March 10, Worcester and her staff spent the rest of university spring break trying to correct the problem.
"We spent more time answering questions than dealing with complaints, but there were defiantly some angry people out there," Worcester said.
By March 12, Worcester and her staff were able to correct the error, and a formal apology letter for the mistake, along with corrected acceptance information, was mailed out to every applicant.
Worcester said she sympathized for those applicants who were lead to believe they had made it into the program, only to find out that they didn't make it.
"We always get applications from more qualified candidates than we can accept into the program," Worcester said. "We were only able to accept 103 students this year."
Exactly how to prevent a blunder like this from ever happening again is what Rod Nimtz, senior director of administration for the Middletown campus, is trying to solve.
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"We're trying to find the best way to centralize all the data we have on entire application groups so that this type of misfortune doesn't happen again," Nimtz said.
Nimtz said the program works with massive amounts of data that must be collected from students doing pre-nurse work at the Oxford campus, as well as from applicants at other universities.
Nimtz said he sees room from improvement on this task of collecting and organizing data.
But, the challenge does not seem to have Nimtz worried.
"We have no plan for improvement just yet, but it's only been a week, so we're still working on it," he said.
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