Funky OMSAS errors

[Kirsteen]

Hi guys,

I'm in the midst of submitting my UT essay to COMPAS and I've just incurred some whacky little errors. Upon pressing the "Save" button, I'm getting a "ERROR 400. The highlighted field contains invalid character(s) ","." I'm reading this to mean that commas are invalid? Whoo!

Any clues?

Cheers,
Kirsteen

[aneliz]

Commas are invalid??? That makes no sense to me...I think that probably what you are seeing is the OMSAS server crashing....I saw very weird error messages last year in the midst of the "big bang". It has nothing to do with what you entered...just that the server is about to crash! The only problem that may have to do with what you entered is if you typed out your essay in a word processor and then cut and pasted it into compass. Make sure you used a font like times new because I know that some people had issues with copying arial in last year...(no idea why). So, I guess my advice is to try again later but get that stuff submitted ASAP because it looks like the beginning of the end for OMSAS again....you would have thought that they could have fixed that stuff in a whole year eh?

[Kirsteen]

Hi aneliz,

Cheers for your note and advice.

I just gave it another go, and the same error messages appear. I am trying to cut and paste from an MSWord file (as I did last year, without incident) and the font is TimesNR. Odd stuff!

I've put a wee note in to OMSAS to see what they have to say about it.

Cheers,
Kirsteen

[Tanya24]

Hi Kirsteen,

You say you moved the document out of Word or another program? That might be the problem. Try going through your essay once it's in your application and replace all the " and ' and , with fresh ones. Just backspace and retype them. Once you've typed them in the OMSAS format, the application will probably accept them. The same thing happened to me. Good luck. Tanya.

[Kirsteen]

Hi there Tanya24,

I just gave your suggestion a shot, and unfortunately I'm incurring the same messages--eeek! I think I'll give OMSAS a wee dingle this morning.

Cheers,
Kirsteen

[Kirsteen]

Hi guys,

I just spoke with OMSAS and managed to get to the root of the ERROR 400 problem. In case anyone else happens to run into the same and the above mentioned strategies don't work, try renaming your Word file as a text (.txt) file. Open the text file and copy it into the appropriate COMPASS box. This should avert any "unrecognizable" characters, and it worked for me.

Cheers to an error free couple of weeks,
Kirsteen

[Kirsteen]

Hi all,

Here's another piece of OMSAS weirdness: I just tried to submit my COMPASS application, but upon pressing "submit" I was prompted with a warning that not all questions from two sections have been answered: Queen's and Ottawa. I'm assuming that the Queen's prompt is due to not filling out their last, optional question, but I've nary a clue as to what the Ottawa dealio may be about. Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers,
Kirsteen