The fact that errors in questions and scoring for an entrance examination last February at Osaka University — which resulted in the rejection of 30 applicants who would otherwise have been admitted — were left unaddressed for nearly a year is disturbing, given the time and opportunities lost for the youths. While the university says it's ready to admit all 30 students in April and offer compensation, it needs to re-examine why it took so long to find out about the mistakes — even though the problem was repeatedly pointed out by outsiders. As the nation enters the entrance exam season this year, operators of all universities across the country should learn from this lesson.

Mistakes happen in entrance exams at universities. In 2001, an error in the allocation of scores in a Japanese-language test for admission to the engineering department of Yamagata University was exposed by a request from an applicant for scoring disclosure. When the university re-examined the past exam records, it found that more than 400 applicants had been mistakenly rejected due to the same error over the five preceding years. It was also learned in the same year that an error in a test scoring program used in the exam for the humanities department at Toyama University left 16 applicants mistakenly rejected — and that the university had covered up the error for two years. More recent examples include errors in questions at Chukyo University in 2015 and scoring mistakes at Osaka Prefecture University, in which the erroneously rejected applicants were later admitted.

These examples indicate that such errors can take place anywhere. The question is whether the institutions, when alerted to the possibility of any mistake, are ready to quickly examine the potential problem and take corrective action.