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March 09, 2005
Harvard Shmarvard
Apparently it's really easy to get into Harvard Business School, or at least businessweek forum on how to hack into HBS's application site to see if you'd been accepted.
Apparently, Harvard decided to post application decisions a month in advance and left them on a server. 119 people read this hack and found out if they had or had not been accepted. After inevitably finding out about the hack, Harvard has announced that all 119 people of these will be denied admission no matter what. In their statement, Kim Clark stated, 'This behavior is unethical at best -- a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization... Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted to this school.'
But is this only the applicants' faults? Isn't the company who was hosting this more to blame, and isn't Harvard responsible at all for leaving application decisions in the open? And can they really prove that the person who viewed the information was the applicant? What if it was an anxious brother or sister or parent with more computer expertise? Other than Harvard's pride what was really hurt here? Is this course of action that Harvard took really ethical itself? I bet we'll see some lawsuits try and determine that in the next few weeks.
Posted by Bryant at March 9, 2005 12:49 AM