Harvard rejects 119 BIZ school applicants

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
1

<p>From CNN's website</p>

<p><a href="http://www.cnn.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.cnn.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Harvard rejects biz applicants it says hacked</p>

<p>'This behavior is unethical at best'</p>

<p>Tuesday, March 8, 2005 Posted: 1:33 PM EST (1833 GMT) </p>

<p>BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- Harvard Business School said Tuesday it is rejecting applications from 119 would-be students who it says hacked into a Web site to learn if they were accepted at the Ivy League university ahead of the official notification.</p>

<p>"This behavior is unethical at best -- a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization," Kim Clark, dean of Harvard Business School, said in a statement.</p>

<p>"Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted to this school."</p>

<p>Harvard said 119 applicants had hacked into Virginia-based ApplyYourself, a company that manages Web pages used by students to apply to roughly 300 different universities.</p>

<p>"We know that 119 applicants hacked into the system -- and we know their names," said Jim Aisner, a spokesman for Harvard Business School.</p>

<p>Aisner declined to comment on how many of the 119 applicants would have been accepted at the school had they not broken into the ApplyYourself Web site.</p>

<p>Harvard is one of several top-tier universities that use ApplyYourself to tell applicants if their applications were successful.</p>

<p>Last week, officials at the site said a computer hacker had helped applicants break into records at some of the most prestigious U.S. business schools including Stanford, Duke and Dartmouth to see if they were accepted weeks before official</p>

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<p>Are the other schools rejecting students?</p>

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<p>they should</p>

4

<p>agree with fiesta_pagana87</p>

5

<p>Yay, more space for the rest of us! (Not that I'm applying to the Business School... but still!)</p>

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<p>Those guys are totally screwed if every other Grad school does what Harvard does.</p>

<p>And, think about this, if any were Harvard undergrads, does it go on their undergraduate record?</p>

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<p>I don't think it would, the two are separate</p>

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<p>Imagine this scenario:
Someone comes on CC and announces that he has found a way to check his Harvard decision before April 1. He tells you how he did it. Given how nervous everybody is at this moment, how many of you would not give it a try?</p>

<p>Power Yogi wrote an interesting blog entry which examined each of the parties involved in the business. Give it a read:
<a href="http://poweryogi.blogspot.com/2005/03/businessweak-power-issue.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://poweryogi.blogspot.com/2005/03/businessweak-power-issue.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Here he shows how simple the hack was:
<a href="http://poweryogi.blogspot.com/2005/03/hbsapplyyourself-admit-status-snafu.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://poweryogi.blogspot.com/2005/03/hbsapplyyourself-admit-status-snafu.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>I actually would not--> I would be too scared to jinx it or something.</p>

<p>*just read that blog... interesting take. then again, i don't understand or care for computer-jabber (who really IS a hacker; etc). interesting nonetheless.</p>

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<p>I absolutely would not do it.</p>

<p>It is a question of honor and ethics. Especially in these days of stock fraud and lying CEO's up on trial, a business school has to look for ethics in its applicants. Those applicants should have realized what they were doing was wrong and their moral compass should've stopped them.</p>

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<p>um yes you would. you wouldn't know they hacked it. they would just say that the decisions were up early, and you would check it.</p>

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<p>I think it would be incredibly hard to resist such a temptation. Most of those applicants are probably fairly good people who were just stressed out from the waiting...and the ability to hack in and find out if you were accepted would be hard to turn down.</p>

<p>It kind of reminds me of the craziness of the December Harvard EA decisions--before a lot of us got our acceptance emails, we could log into the admitted students' pages. As a result, some of us knew we'd been accepted to Harvard an hour or so before we "officially" got in. You don't think that's hacking too now, do you?</p>

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<p>what kind of information did you have to enter to log into the admitted students page?</p>

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<p>cause if it's just the last name, i would not be able to do it as i have one of the most common last names, and a short one at that.</p>

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<p>If I didn't know it was a hack, I would just think it was troubleshooting and then getting my decision in a normal way</p>

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<p>You have your last name and a pin number. So just your last name would not get you on to the page.</p>

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<p>I would explain it the same way the Princeton admissions chief did when he was caught sneaking into the Yale website a few years ago. "I was just checking the security of the system."</p>

<p>LOL</p>