In what is already an extremely stressful time for many students, Columbia University sent acceptance emails to nearly 300 prospective students last Wednesday, only to send another email hours later that the email had been a mistake. 

This is not the first time an admissions office has made this error. Carnegie Mellon University and Tulane University both erroneously sent acceptance letters to applicants last year. In 2009, the University of California, San Diego sent 28,000 acceptance emails to students who had not, in fact, been accepted.

Columbia issued an apology for the miscommunication, citing “human error” as the cause of the incident. Students that got the acceptance email were not outright rejected, but rather their applications are still under review.

To read the full story in The New York Times, click here.