Harvard Business School Rejects All
Hackers
March 2005
Harvard Business School Rejects All 119 'Hackers'
Harvard Business School announced, on
Monday, March 7 that it has decided to reject
applications from all 119 would-be students it accused of
hacking into the ApplyYourself system to learn early if they
were accepted, before the sending of official notifications.
"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.
"Any applicant found to have done so will not be admitted
to this school."
Harvard knew the names of the 119 applicants who
tried to learn their admissions status early using a
security flaw in an online college-recruitment and
application product called ApplyYourself. (The
identification of the hackers was actually quite easy to
determine since the security flaw was simply changing the
very end of the applicant-specific URL.)
Jim Aisner, HBS spokesman, declined to say how many of the 119 would
have been accepted at the school had they not become overly
anxious.
Our own estimate is that about 12 of them likely would
have been admitted and it seems statistically-significant to
think that no admits would come from a pool of that size
given the historical acceptance rate at HBS.
On Tuesday, MIT followed suit by announcing it had rejected
all 32 applicants who attempted to view their Sloan
decisions early. Carnegie Mellon announced they had rejected
all such applicants the previous week and Tuck is expected
to make a decision on Friday, March 11. |
