More Ethics From Harvard

An interesting piece regarding the ethics of Harvard Business School students, sent forward by my lovely fiancee...

Business school applicants who peeked into their prospective school's Web site to see if they had been accepted may have made a stupid mistake, but not one worthy of rejection, a college-prep coach said.

Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to elite U.S. business schools, accused one of the schools, Harvard University, of "ethics grandstanding."

He was responding to Harvard's decision Monday to reject 119 applicants for following a hacker's instructions to visit the school's admissions site to get an early glimpse of acceptance decisions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed suit Tuesday, rejecting 32 applicants, and Carnegie Mellon University made a similar decision last week.

While the business world is getting battered by stories of ethical failures such as fraud, Harvard can make a point by taking on an easy target instead of a more powerful constituency, Kreisberg said. "They can swat it hard and preen," he said.

Three of the Harvard applicants said they thought the school overreacted, and they disputed that accessing what they considered a public Web site with their own identification numbers was either a "hack" or "unethical," as Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark called it.

Applicants accessed admissions sites of at least six schools for about 10 hours on Wednesday after a hacker posted instructions in a BusinessWeek Online forum. Some applicants saw blank pages, and others viewed rejection letters before access was denied.

The instructions told applicants to log in to their admissions Web page and find their identification numbers in the source code, or raw Web programming instructions, available on the site. By plugging those numbers into another Web page address, they were directed to a page where their admissions decision would be found.

I'd say Kreisberg is the one who's grandstanding. I don't know that the students' misconduct merits a rejection, but what they did was wrong (even if I sympathize, because it would be damn hard to resist the temptation to find out whether you'd been accepted or not). If you do something wrong, you bear the risk of something like this happening to you. Doing the right thing is often hard.

My fiancee, the Duke backer, notes that only one potential Duke MBA attempted to hack into the site, which she claims demonstrates the increased integrity of Duke students over those affiliated with Harvard. Considering that the applicant class might be comprised of the same folks, perhaps people only care if they're getting into Harvard. Some might even point out that it could be equally true that Duke applicants couldn't figure out how to read the instructions. Of course, I would never say something like that -- mostly out of fear.