The Office of Undergraduate Admissions received close to 30,000 freshmen and transfer applications for autumn quarter 2002; 1,822 of those applicants never had a shot at getting in.

Those 1,882 applicants were prospective students who mailed in incomplete applications.

“Most commonly students left information blank,” said Lynette Lindsey, senior assistant director of enrollment services, “and every question on the application has a purpose and should be completed.”

When an application is received with incomplete information, students are usually given at least one notice or phone call letting them know that items are missing, Lindsey said.

There is no situation in undergraduate admissions where leaving something blank would automatically merit “tossing out” an application, she said, but leaving portions blank will certainly delay an application.

While undergraduate admissions makes an attempt to notify students by telephone, Ohio State’s graduate schools try to use e-mail and are more reliant on prospective students’ responsibility on following up with their college office to be sure all materials were received.

“Depending on the time of the year, we may contact the students by e-mail,” said Terina Matthews, associate director of admissions and recruitment for Fisher College of Business graduate program. “But if it is our busy time of the year, we keep files in a drawer until we get time to notify the applicant of their mistake.”

This, she warns, may put the student in jeopardy of missing crucial financial aid deadlines.

The Fisher College of Business MBA program had 75 incomplete applications this year.

While Fisher College of Business has its own graduate application, the majority of applicants to OSU’s other programs go through counselors like Jennifer Marinello, who review numerous incomplete applications each year.

Students receive incomplete notices if their graduate application is lacking materials, said Marinello, senior admissions counselor for graduate and international admissions.

The status of graduate school applications are available online, Marinello said, and she emphasizes the need to check with academic departments to be sure all materials have been received.

While undergraduate applications find commonality in portions being blank, the graduate program sees a wide variety of mistakes on their applications.

“Fisher College of Business MBA program has a separate application from OSU graduate admissions,” Matthews said. “Students submit the graduate school requirement of one personal statement, a GRE score and three letters of recommendation.”

“Students also try to make their essay responses or personal statements to fit every application,” Matthews said, ” and because they don’t want to write them over and over again they leave in the name of other schools, or don’t answer the questions we have posed.”

Other common mistakes include omitting e-mail addresses or telephone numbers, both vital for allowing departments to contact you for interviews or questions. In addition, some students go over the page limits for essays.

“Applicants must remember that file readers must read many applications,” Matthews said, “and one of the manners in which they can stand out is to follow the rules of the application.”

Marinello sites the most common mistakes on graduate applications as incomplete answers about Ohio residency, a mistake which could bear heavily on your fees.

“International students often forget to write all variations of their names, and items come to us listed under a different name and aren’t matched to their file,” Marinello said.

Marinello and Matthews said there are several factors that could be potentially detrimental to applications.

“Leaving in the names of other universities, incorrect spelling and grammar mistakes don’t make an admissions officer want to admit an applicant to their graduate program,” Matthews said.

“A surefire way to kill your application would be to forget to order all previous university transcripts, or not to take the GRE or GMAT test,” Marinello said.

Some graduate programs insist that you take GMAT, others insist on the GRE, but Marinello suggests contacting prospective graduate programs to confirm what they require.