Students furious as Liverpool University emails the wrong results

(University of Liverpool)

Thousands of students at the University of Liverpool might have received the wrong exam results today, which the administration is blaming on a technical error.

Students were expecting the results of their end of year exams via email at 9am this morning; instead, they received others’ results, seemingly at random. The university did not notice the problem until 9:18, by which time hundreds of students had already received emails in error.

The university blamed a ‘technical problem’ which was ‘caused by a coding error’.

One angry student who did not wish to be named, awaiting the results of his final degree, described the university’s response to the issue as ‘pathetic’.

“We are paying them a lot of money,” he told The Independent. “There are such harsh penalties for students for handing in late work, yet on the one day of the year when they need to get their timing right, they mess up.

“I received my results from a girl at around 11 – but the university refused to confirm if they were right. I had to wait around in agony for four or five hours until I could find out what I got.”

He went on to claim that there had been system errors on results day at Liverpool for the last few years.

A spokesperson for the university said: “The University sincerely regrets this error and is doing all it can to ensure that students receive the correct results as quickly as possible. In the meantime, all erroneous messages have been deleted from students’ email accounts.”

Matthew Hillman, a second-year studying ancient history said that the biggest problem was that lots of students had been tweeting others’ results.

“I’m affected, and it’s annoying. No one’s posted about me that I can find, so I still don’t know my results.”

He also criticised the vice-chancellor, Sir Howard Newby, who went onto BBC Radio Merseyside to talk about the problem: “He didn’t apologise to students. He just talked about how bad it was for him to have had this happen.

Students began receiving correct results shortly after 4pm. The situation has already inspired a (quite funny) parody account on Twitter.