In February, a rogue computer hacker opened a hole in a prominent Web site that helps students apply to business schools. The hacker created a way for applicants to find out if they've been accepted to the school, and many applicants used the hole to look up their status. In the fallout from the incident, Harvard Business School and other business schools announced that they will summarily reject all applicants who used the hole to check their status. Meanwhile, other schools like Stanford said they will consider the situation on a case-by-case basis.
The case-by-case basis is a fishy policy for a school to have. The students who looked on the Web site did the same thing at just about the same time (the hole was only open for nine hours). The punishments should be uniform because the transgressions were.
Never before has there been a need for an ethical standard on gathering information on the Internet. There are no established rules on the matter, so it's all a sort of gray area. On one hand, checking the site was a bad decision when the applicants must have known it was a questionable call. On the other hand, if you were in their position and had possible access to the status of your application, what would you have done?
All feelings on the schools' decisions aside, the students should not have checked the site because they knew it was a borderline ethical dilemma. They should have known better. And this doesn't just apply to business students or even just students, but people in all walks of life. Are the potential gains of a bad ethical decision worth the potential punishment?
The incident really speaks to how competitive the academic world has become. People are willing to do anything because they are so desperate to get into a name-brand school. There is so much pressure to get into a top school that it pushes some over the edge. It's unfortunate that the name of the school on the diploma has become a more important status symbol than the knowledge gained while earning that diploma.
