A technical error on December 1 caused students’ Polar Points to reflect the amount of points they have at the beginning of the semester. Students’ balances did not actually change. The issue resulted from the setup of spring meal plans and was fixed by Monday evening. Semester Polar Points are scheduled to reset on December 20.
Polar Points were not removed from students’ OneCards and students were still able to spend their remaining fall Polar Points.
“The issue was only in the web application, not the card system itself,” Assistant Director for OneCard Coordinator Chris Bird wrote in an email to the Orient.
The incident was caused by spring meal plans and Polar Points being loaded onto student accounts in order to produce spring billing information. A setting on the OneCard website failed to notice that spring plans were inactive, resulting in the program showing students their spring account balance instead of their fall ones.
Several students emailed Bird over the weekend with screenshots that demonstrated the problem.
Some students who noticed the error believed that their Polar Points had been reset, but discovered this was not the case.
“I think most people working at places where Polar Points were usable were aware of the issue. When I went to buy something from the [convenience store], they said that Polar Points weren’t reset and that the spring funds weren’t usable yet,” said Amanda Trent ’20.
Staff from the OneCard Office and Bowdoin Information Technology staff fixed the display error.