<p>IBclass: Whatever you do, you have to take care to do it right. Snail mail can get screwed up, too, as happened a few years ago with MIT when they inadvertently sent out all of the EA acceptances a day before the rejections and deferrals. That was a mistake, and the people involved apologized and took steps to make certain it wouldn’t happen again.</p>
<p>Same thing here. The problem I was reacting to wasn’t so much that kids had to try a number of times to get into the site. It’s that in many cases decisions did not appear until 3-4 hours after they were supposedly available, and that there appears to have been a systematic difference in when decisions appeared based on the contents of the decision. If that really happened, it’s bush league, and shouldn’t happen again.</p>
<p>No college handles this completely smoothly, as far as I can tell. But lots of colleges handle this volume of inquiries and decisions far better than Chicago did yesterday. To me, that means that there are conventional solutions to the issues posed that Chicago did not know about, or did not implement properly. That’s a management failure, and it deserves to be called out.</p>