Registrar website loses transcripts

The University is expected to announce today that a significant number of transcripts ordered through the registrar's website in December were never sent because of a computer glitch, an official in the registrar's office said, putting seniors' graduate school and fellowship applications at risk.

The official, who asked to have his name withheld, said the problem began Dec. 3 when sophomores signing up for classes overloaded the online SCORE system. In repairing SCORE, OIT staff inadvertently introduced a bug into the transcript ordering website.

"No one knew about the bug for a few weeks," he said, leaving open the question of why students have not yet been informed of the problem.

Early December is a critical time for the transcript ordering site, as seniors use the system to request the University send official transcripts to the graduate schools and fellowship institutions to which they are applying. Deadlines for application materials are generally between mid-December and early January, so transcripts sent now may not be accepted by all institutions.

The registrar's office official said he did not know how many requests were lost, but estimated from the number of transcripts actually sent that it could have been in the hundreds. He added that there was no way to know who ordered the lost transcript requests.

More details are expected in the official announcement.

University registrar Joseph Greenberg declined to comment on the matter, and OIT's director of enterprise services Dan Oberst could not be reached for comment.

OIT's role

Howard Strauss, a low-level OIT administrator not involved in student services, quickly put the blame elsewhere in OIT. The repairs to SCORE were made by "a smattering of teenagers too young to work at Redmond, hackers, virus creators and a menagerie of others," he said.

But one OIT employee who worked on repairing the SCORE problem, Steven Crosby, said he didn't know how their repair work could have affected the transcript ordering site.

"The two systems are pretty separate. Even if we botched something in one, how it would affect the other system — I don't know," he said.

He also denied Strauss' allegation that OIT employs virus creators and expressed sympathy to the affected seniors. "We all work for OIT because we want to improve the technology at Princeton, not destroy it, that's absurd. But if we made a mistake, I really hope [seniors] can work it out with the schools," he said. This is the Daily Princetonian's annual joke issue. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.