Cambridge has apologized after an admissions tutor at St Catharine’s sent a mass email to the wrong distribution list.

Congratulatory emails were sent to up to 400 applicants yesterday morning, weeks after they had been rejected.

The email provided a link to a page in the ‘Undergraduate Admissions’ section of the St Catherine’s College website.

On accessing this page, students were greeted with ‘Congratulations on receiving an offer to come to St Catharine's!’ The site continued: ‘Now that the dust has settled after the admissions season, there is some information we would like you to read through.’

The page, entitled, ‘Information for offer holders’, explains the Cambridge collegiate system, and gives details about accommodation and maintenance costs, tuition fees, and term dates. The page also has a timetable for further communication with the college in the run-up to the start of the academic year in October.

The father of a student whose application to read medicine at St Catharine’s had already been rejected called the blanket email ‘unprofessional’.

He criticized the error as giving ‘false hope to young people who are in the middle of their A-levels’, adding that ‘everyone makes mistakes, but you expect a bit better from Cambridge.’

One student, commenting on the blunder, said: 'If that had happened to me, I would have thought it was some kind of cruel joke. Talk about rubbing salt in the wound...' 

The University has acknowledged the mistake and an apology was swiftly sent to the affected students.

A spokesman from the University called such an error ‘rare’; despite the ‘large volumes of decisions’ Cambridge has to deal with on an annual basis.

Yet according to one member of the popular online forum, ‘The Student Room’, this isn’t the first blunder made by the college’s admissions office.

On a thread entitled ‘Rejected AND accepted: St. Catharine's Physical Natsci’, a student claims to have received a rejection letter in January 2009, which was followed by an apologetic phone call and another letter confirming his place at the college.

Admissions statistics show that each year between 550 and 600 students apply for a place at St Catharine’s, and around 150 receive offers.