Re my PGCE place, I was requested to send all necessary information to them such as certificates and photographs by no later than 2/23/12.

Now, me being British and the university being in the UK I read the date as 22/3/12.

am I wrong for assuming the wrong date format being used or should one expect a UK university to use the accepted format of DD/MM/YYYY?

Had it been 2/3/12, there might have been some ambiguity, but since there are only 12 months in the year, you obviously got it wrong.

Man up and accept it. Maybe it was an intelligence test.

PS – you failed.

bloody american backward date format. it has no logic.

1) if their original correspondence was computer generated then it’s possible that it was left on a US default
2) to turn 2/23 into 22/3 requires more bloodymindedness than turning 2/23 into 23/2
3) much as I loathe the US system, does one say “twenty-third of February” or “February the 23rd”? I think more likely the latter suggesting the US version is at least a little more idiomatic.

The correct course of action would have been to send the form in on Feb 23rd with red ink correcting their erroneous use of the daft yank date format, and “C- must try harder” written at the bottom.

I say the 23rd of February. As do most people who have managed to remain relatively un-American-ised 🙂

I don’t think you can realistically argue that you’d read 2/23/12 as 22/3/12. Not unless it was in a really weird font which didn’t display “/”, anyway.

I think you should appeal anyway, sounds like mitigating circumstances.

Had it been 2/3/12, there might have been some ambiguity

There’s more ambiguity in your example but it made more sense to believe it was the later date as i only recieved the letter on the 14th feb giving me only 1 week to attain a copy of my GCSEs, Birth Cert and photos which by anyone’s standards is cutting it fine!

Perhaps calmly reply that you figured that meant you had until the second of November, 2013?

I don’t think you can realistically argue that you’d read 2/23/12 as 22/3/12. Not unless it was in a really weird font which didn’t display “/”, anyway.

I believe it to be more likely to put a “/” in the wrong place than get the date format wrong.

Its a feature of PGCE courses that they squeeze 23 months work into year. This is later offset by you spreading 9 months work across a year thereafter. 🙂

I much prefer the 2012/02/23 format.
Kepps the most significant digits first, like the rest of our numeral system. The US and the UK have it wrong.

loum – that’s how I name all work files. Each filename starts YYYY MM DD ????.xls, that way you can sort by creation date, not modified date when you have lots of versions to manage.

YYYYMMDD is the “logical” choice.

maybe I should tell them that logically I thought they meant 2232/01/2 giving me over 200 years to get the forms to them!

23rd Feb 2012 is what I would assume.

giving me only 1 week to attain a copy of my GCSEs, Birth Cert and photos which by anyone’s standards is cutting it fine!

Really? It would take me about an hour and I’m really not that organised…

loum – Member

Kepps the most significant digits first, like the rest of our numeral system.

TBH in all my work and most of my personal stuff the year is the least relevant- I want to know if stuff is happening next month, next week, etc but I know what year it’s happening in.

Put it a different way- I could drop the year on most of our dating and it wouldn’t often be an issue. If I dropped the month, it’d all be completely useless.

The main reason to put year first is that you can sort them in date order very easily – an alphabetical sort does it, so you can just click the filename column heading in Windows explorer and voila.

^ that

druidh – Member
YYYYMMDD is the “logical” choice.

It all depend on if you want to start with the least significant bit or most significant bit.

23/02/2012 makes sense as dose 2012/02/23 but 02/23/2012 does not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness

If you just assumed the wrong date format, you would also have come up with 23rd of Feb surely? You instead assumed it was a typo, and didn’t bother checking with them. A gamble that unfortunately didn’t come off it seems. Makes no sense to have MM DD YYYY to me either though. The 25th of August is how I tell people my birthday for instance.
Definitely worth arguing the toss though if they have denied you a place as a result.

loum – Member
I much prefer the 2012/02/23 format.
Kepps the most significant digits first, like the rest of our numeral system. The US and the UK have it wrong.

Stoner – Member
loum – that’s how I name all work files. Each filename starts YYYY MM DD ????.xls, that way you can sort by creation date, not modified date when you have lots of versions to manage.

This and this.

slainte 🙂 rob

Stoner – Member
loum – that’s how I name all work files. Each filename starts YYYY MM DD ????.xls, that way you can sort by creation date, not modified date when you have lots of versions to manage.

http://git-scm.com/