After a UNC-Chapel Hill admissions employee pulled up the wrong distribution list telling students they had been accepted to the school and for them to send in their mid-year high school grade reports, much fuss has been made about the complicated process of admissions.

According to WRAL, UNC’s admissions department immediately tried to correct the problem by sending 9,500 e-mails to all candidates, whose applications are still under review, apologizing for the error.

Thomas Griffin, director of undergraduate admissions at N.C. State, said no admissions director can honestly say his or her office could never make a mistake. “NCSU’s undergraduate admissions process is quite different from UNC’s process,” Griffin said.

According to Griffin, the University does use several different safeguards in preventing an incident such as this happening.

“In order to provide superior customer service and a fair review of admissions, applications [for undergraduates] must have excellent people involved in the admissions process,” Griffin said. “Regardless of how hard employees work and how competent they are, sometimes mistakes are made.”

The best thing admissions can do is try to minimize the potential for mistakes and reduce any negative impact on students when admissions does make mistakes, Griffin said.

“The [undergraduate admissions] system that e-mails applicants has limited the full e-mail capability to a very small group of administrators,” he said.

Griffin noted the University would be very sorry and disappointed if such an error were to ever occur to its applicants.

“We would be completely honest and transparent about the mistake,” Griffin said. “We would immediately notify the applicants of the error, apologize for the mistake, explain how the error occurred and outline the steps [undergraduate admissions] had taken to keep the problem from reoccurring.”