What happens if an admissions officer confuses you, like your social media or application, with someone else with the same name as you? How do they prevent this from happening?
When you apply for admission, the software schools use leverage information like your SSN, Date of Birth, Address, Email Address, High School attended, HS graduation year, common nicknames, etc. to check against unintentionally creating duplicates.
Our software put records that needed additional review aside and a person looked at the information very carefully.
My personal favorite was twins (same DOB, address, HS, same parental email used) with SSNs one digit off, with the same first and last name and their middle names were one character different. But we figured a way to code it so the computer didn’t flag it as a duplicate.
One of the Singer-related college admission scandals involved two water polo players with the same name at the same high school. One was good enough to be a recruited athlete at a college. The other was not, but was “recruited” at a different college using the actual recruited athlete’s athletic achievements.
But this was intentional deception involving corrupt athletic officials at the college, not an unintentional combining of two people like credit reporting companies are prone to do.