The University of California, Davis, delivered good news to 6,800 college applicants Monday: Along with being accepted for the fall quarter, they each would receive the coveted $7,500 Regents Scholarship.

That was a mistake. With one bad computer click, the promise of largesse that was meant for only 800 freshmen instead was e-mailed to everyone notified in the first round of UC Davis admissions offers.

The mistake, caught and corrected quickly, drew an immediate apology from UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef and gave pause - if only briefly - to students like Carly Creelman who are deciding which college to attend.

"I kind of didn't believe it, but I was proud," said the Mira Loma High School senior. "I'm probably not going to go to Davis (she is eyeing UC Santa Barbara), but getting in meant a lot. For that brief period when I thought I had the scholarship, it might have made me weigh my decision to go to Davis a little differently."

University officials - who used e-mail for the first time this year to notify winners of Regents Scholarships - discovered the error within three hours of sending out the first message. They followed up quickly with a second message reaffirming the admission offer and apologetically retracting the scholarship award.

Vanderhoef expressed deep regret Tuesday and has issued a personal letter of apology to the students and parents who received the erroneous scholarship notices. He also said the 800 scholarship winners would receive a letter reaffirming their award.

"I'm a parent who has had a couple of kids go to school and have had the highs and lows of these kinds of awards," Vanderhoef said. "I just feel so strongly for the students and their parents. It's the kind of thing you don't want to happen. ... We have to go about making sure it doesn't happen again."

UC Davis spokeswoman Lisa Lapin said the mistake occurred in the campus office in charge of distributing mass e-mail.

"It was human error," Lapin said. "Two different letters were provided to the postmaster with two different batches of e-mail. Somebody attached the wrong letter to the (6,000) notifications.

"We will look at new procedures and more checks and balances to be sure this doesn't happen again," she said.

The Regents Scholarship is UC's most prestigious. The merit-based award provides freshman winners $30,000 over four years. Winners who transfer to UC as juniors receive $15,000 over two years. Current costs for a year at UC Davis run about $15,000.

Mira Loma senior Zach Baron saw both notices - the scholarship and then the clarification - within about 30 seconds of one another.

"Normally you expect colleges to have it together a little bit more," Baron said. "But it isn't as bad as getting an acceptance and then being told that getting in was a mistake."

Monday marked the first of three days that UC Davis sent out electronic admissions offers for the coming fall to freshmen and transfer students.

Notices to all 21,000 students who've been chosen for fall admission continued to go out Tuesday and will wrap up today. The UC system increasingly is communicating with current and prospective students via e-mail, but UC Davis is also following electronic notices with paper ones sent through the U.S. Postal Service.

"The students we recruit are used to this kind of communication," Vanderhoef said of the electronic notifications. "This was meant to be a convenience for them so they could find out a few days earlier."