Bostonist: B-School's Best, Denied.

nina

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 10:22:38 -0500

How 'bout MCI Walpole? Dee-Yes, I think it's Harvard's fault that somehow their system was accessed, but most people wait to find out and don't cheat the process. Why should HBS be obligated to accept students who are cheating the admissions process? Even if their (the 119 hackers) intentions were in their own interest, they opened up material that is confidential. Bottom line, Harvard shouldn't have had a hackable system and the hackers shouldn't have hacked. Thus, Harvard has no obligation to accept them. My father is a prof (MD) and a director of one of their clinical departments, and my mother teaches at the medical school and is a dean. This is a touchy subject! I assume that while stanford has taken no defintitve action, most likely they won't accept those prospective students. Harvard's motto is Veritas-truth- and hacking just isn't very honest.

Dee

Fri, 11 Mar 2005 02:08:25 -0500

Dishonest? How so? They accessed, through a ridiculous flaw in the website, their own records. they didn't breach any sercurity, because there wasn't any to breach... And the information would have been provided to them in a few months anyway, so what difference does it make? They capitalized on a shoddy system, but what harm did it cause?

Josh

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 10:54:15 -0500

Point taken, Nina. I was being sarcastic, of course, and in reality would be delighted if the denizens of our nation's boardrooms were even half as ethical as the average denizen of, say, MCI-Concord.

Nina

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 19:20:51 -0500

It's not as if HBS is desperate for applicants. It would be unethical for Harvard to accept dishonest people over the many other probably applicants. Think about it this way: these are the potential people that will be running corporate America, how would you like them managing your money? This is the online equivalant to breaking into an admissions office: any applicant who did that would be arrested, forget dissmissed, and any student would be expelled. we have enough crooked people in american business, must we give Ivy league educations to 119 more?

jon

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 12:59:00 -0500

Agreed Josh, the "hack" was really only a simple procedure of viewing the code and amending a hidden field (seen clearly in the source code) to the URL after login. Pretty clever hack, I think they should give Brookbond a scholarship.

Josh

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 12:26:00 -0500

Isn't b-school supposed to be about hustle and such? "Unethical at best" ought to be hearty praise at HBS - perhaps grounds for admission or a special scholarship - not a reason to get the boot.