College Admissions Sites Breached

Business Schools Reject Applicants Who Sought Sneak Peek

BOSTON -- Business school applicants who peeked into their prospective school's Web site to see if they had been accepted may have made a stupid mistake, but not one worthy of rejection, a college-prep coach said.

Sanford Kreisberg of Cambridge Essay Service, which helps students apply to elite U.S. business schools, accused one of the schools, Harvard University, of "ethics grandstanding."

He was responding to Harvard's decision Monday to reject 119 applicants for following a hacker's instructions to visit the school's admissions site to get an early glimpse of acceptance decisions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed suit Tuesday, rejecting 32 applicants, and Carnegie Mellon University made a similar decision last week.

While the business world is getting battered by stories of ethical failures such as fraud, Harvard can make a point by taking on an easy target instead of a more powerful constituency, Kreisberg said.

"They can swat it hard and preen," he said.

Three of the Harvard applicants said they thought the school overreacted, and they disputed that accessing what they considered a public Web site with their own identification numbers was either a "hack" or "unethical," as Harvard Business School Dean Kim B. Clark called it.

Applicants accessed admissions sites of at least six schools for about 10 hours on Wednesday after a hacker posted instructions in a BusinessWeek Online forum. Some applicants saw blank pages, and others viewed rejection letters before access was denied.

The instructions told applicants to log in to their admissions Web page and find their identification numbers in the source code, or raw Web programming instructions, available on the site. By plugging those numbers into another Web page address, they were directed to a page where their admissions decision would be found.

Stanford University has not made a decision about the hacking and urged its applicants to explain their decision to follow the hacker's instructions. Dartmouth College said it would meet Friday with ethics professors, deans and admissions officials as part of its ongoing investigation. Duke University said only one applicant attempted to get into its site and failed, and that applicant's case is still under consideration.

At MIT's Sloan School of Management, officials studied how applicants attempted to access the decisions before deciding to ban those who tried -- with a chance to reapply later if they prove they have learned from the mistake.