<p>Here's an example of how colleges don't agree that "everyone cheats, so having a cheating violation is excuseable" as some students have claimed on some College Confidential boards.</p>
<p>It looks like colleges don't agree -- or at least don't want to accept students who have ethical problems. From the San Francisco Chronicle:</p>
<p>"<br>
All 41 Stanford MBA applicants who tried to hack into a third-party computer system to find out their admissions status ended up getting rejected by the university, officials have announced. </p>
<p>Stanford had agreed to consider the applications on a case-by-case basis after a hacker had gotten into a BusinessWeek online forum in March and told people how they might sneak a peek at their admission status through a temporary flaw in the ApplyYourself online application program. </p>
<p>Heh, looks like this story has creeped back up. Like I said, using the term "hacking" in this case is absurd. More like "absolutely transparent security system". All someone had to do was look through the source code of a page to find their userID, and then copy that along with a word into the address bar, and then press enter. </p>
<p>Anyway, you're right in what you say that they both show ethics deficiency. My complaint is more toward the article. What the students did was like peeking at an open grade book that a teacher left in the room.</p>
<p>Yeah, sneaking into a school's computer system is a lot more severe of a transgression than copying someone's homework..you can't compare them directly.</p>
<p>Its a matter of standards one has for ones self- cheating is cheating, wherever it is on a scale from one to ten. </p>
<p>As for the hacking, it wasn't like an "accident" they saw their results, it took a few steps to sneak around the system. Just because someone else figured it out and shared, doesn't mean its right to use that information.</p>
<p>They didn't "Peek in a grade book" - its more like the teacher accidentally printed out THEIR grades (which they weren't supposed tohave yet) on the back of an assignment and they looked at them. They didn't take any information that the universities didn't give them - the universities just slipped up in letting them have said information so early. It wasn't hacking or unethical - it was a badly designed system for notifications that gave away too much information.</p>
<p>BTW, everyone should stop the stealing/hacking/etc... comparisions, because this isn't any of them. This is a university making a mistake that admittedly opportunistic kids exploited.</p>
<p>I agree with lucifer11287. Look at the SAT's last week, someone found a way to get scores early and we ALL went running to try it. Is that unethical?</p>
<p>Unethical cheating is cheating no matter how innocent it is. My advice for everyone reading this is to not get in the habit of cheating. It's an incredibly hard habit to break. </p>
<p>Perhaps it starts in high school with cheating on an algebra test is a serious offense. It's not that serious an offense. The teacher might have been unreasonable; it might have been easy to get away with it. And then you feel allright with that because you didn't get caught so you might try to cheat at something else. Perhaps in college, you decide to plagarize part (or sometimes) all of a paper. Maybe you won't get caught there. Then you'll probably try to cheat again at something again, perhaps in business.</p>
<p>The point is that once you start unethical behavior, it is very hard to stop.</p>