150 students of economy were not accepted to the second semester at their program – despite they were guaranteed a place. An administrative error made those who had applied for the introduction course in political economy valid for admission instead.
150 students at the bachelor program in economy were as late as this morning through their acceptance letter informed that they were not accepted to the course to which they were guaranteed a place. “There was an error in the admission process. What I understand is that the school doesn’t really know what went wrong. A conclusion to be drawn is that there is a mistake in the allocation between those students who are admitted to the bachelor’s program and those who applied to the independent political economy course,” says Anton Blidhem, vice chairman at the Student Union for Business and Economics Students. “The students at the bachelor program have a priority access but late yesterday afternoon they were still registered as stand-by students. The University has paid attention to this and today they claim that they solved the problem in principal,” he continues.
An unfortunate system error What will happen with students who have applied to the independent course and then been accepted incorrectly? Pontus Hansson, director of studies at the School of Economics and Management and course coordinator of the introduction course in political economy has the answer: “The incident is an unfortunate system error. Students at the bachelor program in politics and the bachelor program in economy were incorrectly placed as stand-by students. This is now corrected. Those students who have applied to the independent course in political economy and been accepted, will not have to change. That is, it will be an unusually big group of students next semester,” says Pontus Hansson.
How many students will begin your course this spring?
“At present about 510 and normally it is 400. The number will probably be reduced to around 450 after reductions,” he says.
A central problem At the institution of political economy they say that the responsibility is the Lund University Central Admission Unit. Communication is established between the faculty and those responsible for the admission to find out what went wrong. To sum up the system error, apart from yesterday’s upset and surprised program students, it has led to that more students than usual have been accepted to the program and now can prepare to study political economy next semester.
Lundagård has tried to reach those centrally responsible for the admission at Lund University but without success.
Text: Pontus Bark
Translation: Lars Jansson
