Ethics Newsline®

BOSTON
Two of the nation’s top business schools came out swinging last week after being hacked by prospective students, saying candidates who sneaked a peek into their admissions files would be barred from enrolling.

Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management last week said they would follow the lead of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business in barring students who hacked their way into an admissions site one week earlier.

Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business each said they are considering similar steps, reported the Boston Globe.

Last week’s actions follow the hacking of a site used by the business schools to handle admissions applications. Applicants followed directions posted in a BusinessWeek Online forum by a hacker, exposing the system for about ten hours before administrators figured out how to shut the hole.

“This behavior is unethical at best — a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization,” said Kim Clark, dean of Harvard Business School, which will reject 119 applicants for hacking the system.

While at least one admissions expert said the schools were overreacting, MIT business school dean Richard Schmalensee said the hacking was a clear violation of trust, warranting the school’s rejection of 32 applicants.

“Our mission statement talks about principled, innovative leaders and we take the principled part seriously,” Schmalensee said in an interview with the New York Times.

”Business schools teach students to make decisions and to be accountable for those decisions,” said Derrick Bolton of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, which has asked the hacking applicants to explain their reasoning before the school makes a decision.

”We hope that the applicants who accessed their accounts might contact us to explain their behavior and to take ownership for their actions,” Bolton said.