University of California, San Diego accidentally sent an email to 28,000 students who had already received letters of rejection. School administrators blamed the error on “access[ing] the wrong database.”
Has anyone on MyChances received one of the 28,000 acceptance goof-ups?
Read the full story here from the LA Times: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/03/uc-admissions.html
It’s March and thousands upon thousands of high school seniors are suffering from what our users are calling “Waiting for College Reply Syndrome”. Symptoms include uneasiness, constantly wondering if the college actually got your application materials, and feeling like you are the only person who hasn’t heard back from a school. If you’re feeling this right now, please know that you are not alone. Hop onto our forums and commiserate with others in your same situation, go play our Admissions Expert game, and check out the profiles of other students applying to your schools to pass the time (and get transparency into the application decisions coming out!).
We’ve been hosted at HostGator for a couple of years now, and have had a good experience with them until last night.
Last night, HostGator made as-yet-undisclosed, and unannounced, security changes to their servers. During this period, they put up ‘Under Maintenance’ signs across all hosted sites. For us, this lasted from about 3:00am-4:00am. Problematically, these signs were not ‘nocached’. Therefore, some visitors are still seeing these pages instead of the current content.
Far more troubling is what occurred to the databases during that time. We started getting database errors around 1:30, and one table even crashed. At that point, we ran a repair command, which was successful. So far, so good. Then, from 3-4am, the ‘Under Maintenance’ signs were put up. Also not really a problem, since no database modifications could be made during that time.
When those ‘Under Maintenance’ signs were turned off, the site was functional again and I assumed we were good to go. We allowed members to continue signing up and making changes to their profiles. We made forum posts. I even did a fair amount of college-name hygiene, replacing less-common college names with their more common nicknames (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University ==> Virginia Tech).
This is where I become profoundly disappointed in HostGator: I awoke around noon (hey, I’m on spring break) to find that none of my changes had stuck. In fact, a whole bunch of forum posts that were made after the site came back online were deleted. Most problematically, college profile updates and new member accounts created in the few hours before and after the update were also deleted. From my perspective, there is no good excuse for this. Since HostGator was aggressive enough to replace our site’s content with “Under Maintenance” signs, all maintenance should have been completed while those signs were still up. The site became accessible, but then had its database rolled back to a version from approximately 5 hours prior. Whatever triggered them to do this, I do not know. What I do know is that they exhibited poor business practices last night.
For all of you who modified your profile last night from about 11pm Eastern to 6am (and there were surprisingly many of you), we apologize that your changes were lost.
A choice comment from a New York Times reader:
If the government owns 80% of AIG, simply have the owners order management not to pay these bonuses.
Anyone who feels damaged by not receiving a bonus would be free to sue and have the issue decided by a jury selected from the general population.
On March 9, MyChances.net got a shout out from the LA Times. The original article, Anxious college hopefuls look for reassurance online, mainly focused on the “Chance Me” threads found on college admissions websites, including City-Data.com, CollegeConfidential.com, and MyChances.net. While the LA Times did tout the benefits students can receive from getting feedback from each other, the article took a mostly critical tone of students “chance me” threads in forums online, with a primary focus on negative postings found on CollegeConfidential.com as supporting evidence of how students can give hurtful feedback. The implication was that such feedback can be non-constructive and could harm a student’s ability to get into the colleges of their dreams – either by hurting their confidence or by discouraging them from applying to a college altogether.
The biggest problem with students chancing one another, the Times argued, was that there is an over-reliance on “the numbers” and too little emphasis is given to the student as a whole to determine if a student is truly a good fit for a college. Here at MyChances, James and I want to provide the community the means to support each other as best as possible. We provide both algorithm based estimates to help advise students of their odds of getting accepted, as well as the ability for the community to give feedback and “chance” their fellow students to provide further insight to applicants.
Our computer based predictions are based on actual real world statistics from actual applicants and their accepted/rejected information, not on personal whims (as appears is the case for many other college admissions “What are My Chances” tools out there on the web). Even so, our predictions by no means guarantee an accepted or rejected letter. This was part of the rationale for implementing our community predictions tool. Ideally, human “chancers” would look deeper into the profiles of each other to get an even more holistic view of how likely our members are of getting accepted or rejected by a college than even our algorithms are (with their thousands upon thousands of datapoints).
If you have any ideas about how we might improve our current system for providing feedback and advice for one another, please let us know. James and I strive to provide the best, most transparent (and statistics driven) college admissions resource available. As always, we’re open to any suggestions, comments, or criticisms you may have of our college analytics features, or anything else on MyChances.
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