Having gone through the college application process, most Dartmouth students understand the agony of having to sit and wait for institutions to make their admission decisions.
But some impatient business-school applicants decided to find out their fates early this year by hacking into admissions information at several prominent institutions, including Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and the business schools of Duke, Harvard, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon Universities.
A hacker going by the name "brookbond" posted instructions on a Business Week online forum describing how applicants could check their admissions status before they were officially notified.
"I know everyone is getting more and more anxious to check [the] status of their apps to [Harvard Business School]," the hacker wrote in a message which remained on the website for over nine hours before being removed by site administrators. "So I looked around on their site and found a way."
Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School, said the school is taking the situation very seriously and will carry out a full investigation before determining what action to take.
"We want to be thoughtful about this process," Danos said. "We feel it's important to collect as much information as we can before we make a decision."
The Tuck School's January-round applicants are waiting for decisions due March 31.
The hacked schools all use a Fairfax, Va.-based application-processing and notification website called ApplyYourself, used by over 400 colleges and universities. Of this large pool, only about 150 business school applicants attempted to access their admissions information, and of these, few successfully gained it.
"This is not something that a person of ordinary skill would have been able to detect," said Len Metheny, ApplyYourself's president and chief executive officer. "It took somebody of high computer skill to put the pieces together."
Metheny explained that the hacker gained access to a secure page, namely the decision page, which displays the information on whether or not the student was accepted. Accessing the information was largely dependent on whether or not the school had put it there.
Such was the case with the 41 applicants to Stanford University's business school who attempted to access their admissions information using brookbond's technique. The school does not post admission decisions until its official announcement date.
Stanford has identified which applications were accessed, but like many schools that have identified their hackers, officials have not decided whether or not to deny them entrance to the MBA program based on this incident.
Business school officials have noted that it is impossible to determine whether or not it was the applicant who accessed the information or merely someone using the applicant's account, such as a parent.
Of all the business schools whose applicants may have hacked the system, only the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon has publicly stated that it would deny admission to any applicant who accessed the secure information.
Although the Tuck School has not yet commented on whether any applicants have been identified as accessing the secure decision page, Metheny said it should have the capability to.
"The system does allow a school to look at certain activity levels on a profile, if a school desired to search for them," Metheny said.
The Tuck School has not commented as to whether or not it will do so, and whether applicants will be penalized for their curiosity.
