Schools Boot Snoopy Grad Students
It was a scandal so awful that Harvard Business School rejected more than 100 applicants. MIT called it an ethical breach. Stanford called it troubling.
Two students, who CBS News agreed not to identify, were among hundreds who broke into their own admission files online to find out early if they'd been accepted to business school.
Asked to describe what they did, one of the students says: "I'd probably describe it as taking advantage of a loophole."
As CBS News Correspondent Wyatt Andrews reports, it wasn't exactly hacking. Someone had posted the backdoor instructions and the students accessed their own files three weeks early.
One of the students says she did it because, "Everyone in this situation was under an extreme amount of stress, and you know, a lapse in judgment happened."
But the schools reacted severely. Harvard and MIT immediately rejected everyone who peeked "because it wasn't an impulsive mistake," said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Schmalensee said MIT had to signal it could not welcome the ethically challenged.
"It was something, you know, you're going someplace you are not supposed to go and you are taking some time to get there," Schmalensee. "Where's the ethics violation if you open a looked door?"
"I was looking at my own information," says one student who peeked. "I wasn't trying to alter someone's decision. Ultimately all I wanted to do was see something that was mine."
Asked to respond to that, Schalmansee notes "Is there nothing wrong with going through the files just because you can?"
Part of what's happening here involves a generational gap over ethics. Students who grew up with the Internet tend to see it as wide-open territory and don't view this level of Web snooping as a character flaw.
On the other hand, top-ranked business schools are under pressure to emphasize ethics. In the wake of Enron, WorldCom and Martha Stewart, business schools are competing to be more ethical than thou.
They're doing this, says Schalmanesee, "to send a message to society as a whole that we are attempting to produce people that when they go out in the world will behave ethically."
The schools will allow the offending students to reapply next year, but these students, who insisted they be interviewed in secret, believe some simple Internet surfing has branded them as cheaters for life.