If one were to look up the definition of “Correlation does not imply causation,” there will be a link to this post. 
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is poking around the web portal a sign of intellectual curiosity ?
I don’t know what the students back then were doing, but I don’t think anyone would get in trouble for trying to log into their financial aid portal and seeing the To-Do list?
No.
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No, I don’t think it did either. This was something entirely different. This was what they thought was some “backdoor” hack that if they put in their email it would take them to their decision page or something like that. My old age and memory is not serving me well right now. I should correct myself and say maybe someone did get in, but honestly I don’t recall one single person doing that and getting in. I mean, your giving Cornell you’re email outright saying you are trying to hack your decision. Who would be so naive? In your case, you were not doing that.
I think also you’re talking about the financial aid portal and that’s different. There is always something going on with that. It’s different for different people and I think some of it has to do with when they finish going through your financial aid and/or when they may need more documents. Cornell is so stingy on FA we didn’t bother applying for it this time and tbh it’s kind of nice not having to worry about that FA portal to log in to compare to see what one person has over another. But the waiting is rough. This go around my senior was deferred ED. So he just waits, submits his updates to his app, but also forges ahead with his other acceptances in this wonderful year. 
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I heard something similar on AP results. you provide your ID and go to a3rd party site, you would know the AP scores days ahead.
this is very simple, not encouraged though. Because email is the ID for login, for backdoor hacking, you don’t need password. they must know your ID/email to pull your the correct result.
Don’t ever dream to do this, I suggest.
That’s different and everyone does that as that is a redirect of the vpn so that it appears you’re in a timezone that has their scores already.
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My access is back, but my days as internet sleuth are over. To be transparent, I input all financial aid information for all of my children. We are doing OK, but my kids don’t need to know specifics. They know the financial parameters we set for college, but I don’t want them to see our finances and get a false sense of security (at college or in life). So when I say I am “allowed” financial information, I mean by agreement with our kids. Admissions, essays, etc. are off limits for my review. When I saw this was on the financial aid page, I looked. I did not know how to “inspect” a page. When I learned how, I saw a wall of code that meant nothing to me. I gave up, left my laptop on and went to bed. I woke up to find I was still logged into the page, but now there was a message saying my access was denied. It is back now, but I am done checking. I really don’t think what I did was “hacking” but I need to keep my curiosity in check and I feel bad for that. I’ll take a cue from my child and wait until 4/6.
You were not hacking. Don’t worry about it. As far as inputting their financial aid info, just be aware, since I do it too, they get emails that tell them their expected EFC, etc from FAFSA. We have a set college email account we use for all the college stuff so we can all access it and after I filled out the Fafsa info for my son’s part since I’m with you, kids don’t need to know all my business, he still got something because of his own expectation etc based on what I entered for his utma accounts, etc.
Thank you
If you are messing with the website code, it sort of is hacking. Which should nullify applications imo.
it is not hacking, you are not permanently changing the website code.
it is local modification, not even cornell will know you are using inspect
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I am not saying you are wrong. I can tell you a wall of code pops up when you hit “inspect”. I wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t change anything. I barely recognize it as web code. I looked at it and said I could go to school for a year and not know what I am looking at. Changing anything was the furthest from my mind.
using inspect element alone is not modifying anything. But if you change the page source with your browser, you “may” alter the output and input to do wild things.
That has consequence.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Every single page published in the world has an “inspect” ability to view the code. It’s there for a reason, to see how the page was coded and to publicly share the coding used for the page. You can even do that to this page. As long as you’re not tampering with the code, which you cannot publicly, you can inspect and look for any information on the publicly accessible code through inspect element. It is by no means hacking, that’s just a whole different ball game.
I remember when my mother first used an ATM and she was afraid once that she entered the wrong pin. She thought that meant she would be getting money from someone else’s account and be accused of stealing.
I image there are people 30 years my junior on this site reading my post and laughing the same way I laughed at my mom.
That said, I am out.
Thanks to everyone here
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what is “changing the page source”? is that altering the code? because i did that…to no avail though
if you didnt find anything, chances are what you did is harmless
yeah also inspect is chrome–i dont know how cornell would have any access to what i do on my laptop, without some illegal cookie stuff. that being said, i don’t understand how people were rejected in years past for logging on to other parts of the website to see their decision early. For all cornell knows, they were just trying to get to their portal.