Stanford Rejects Business School Hackers

robbarrett writes "The Stanford Report offers the next chapter in a continuing story about business school applicants manipulating URLs on the ApplyYourself system to determine their personal admission status. Harvard immediately rejected the 'hacker' applicants, but Stanford gave 'offenders' the opportunity to defend their actions. However, none of the competitive applicants 'was able to explain his/her actions to our satisfaction,' according to Stanford's dean, so all were rejected. The story mentions the decisions reached by other schools involved in the mess."

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[jesdynf]

I pledge, the next time I hear of such a possible exploit, to rip as much information from the system as the website gives me permission to retrieve. Every bit of it -- I shall construct scripts, pore over forums, and create a list of possible students whose data I will then attempt to extract.

Additionally, with these links in hand, I shall paste them to random places on the internet, and specific places such as the most likely forums to find such students. I will also disguise their nature and essence, so that users will not know what they click on until it's too late.

So the next time Stanford comes calling, you go ahead and /blame me/. I could've been the one to do it, after all. You don't know I didn't. They don't know I didn't.

Or they could just accept that their own goddamn marketing department creates an illusion of prestige, and that people with a limited amount of time to waste on non-responsive colleges /sitting on/ important information like that are going to want to know who to stop wasting time on, and that if they don't like it they can /fix their fucking permissions/. Do they not know any decent webapp programmers? Who've they been graduating?

I didn't peak

[Besjon]

I'm a geek and after many years of making fun of those MBA-types had a change of fate and applied to several business schools. I was waiting for my acceptance notification when the news about the "hack" broke.

Due to the staggered and overlapping notification dates, it would have been extremely helpful to know results in advance. Imagine the scenario of being accepted to one school with your deposit deadline due before being notified if you got into your preferred, but more difficult to get into school. Do you pass on sure thing behind door #1 or skip it for a chance at door #2? When you're facing relocation and close to $100,000 of expenses (with no income) over the next two years you want to make as informed a choice as possible. So I understand the desire to get the extra information.

HOWEVER, these are business schools. They all have a huge emphasis on ethics and take it very seriously (especially over the past several years due to high profile scandals). As soon as I saw the news I knew it would end badly for peakers. No matter if you believe it was acceptable or not to peak - as a business school candidate you should have realized peaking could get you into trouble.

I found it amusing that the b-school(s) gave the accused an opportunity to defend their actions. It almost implies the ethics violation would have been tolerated had the candidate been persuasive enough to talk their way out of it.