Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business chose last week not to follow Harvard Business School's lead in automatically denying admission to applicants accused of hacking into an admissions processing website to learn the decision on their applications early, Tuck Dean Paul Danos said in a press release.
"The involvement in this incident was deemed a very important, negative factor, but only one of many factors in our admissions decisions," Danos said.
Dartmouth is one of over ten business schools that used an online application system built by ApplyYourself.com. The website was programmed such that an applicant could view his or her decision early simply by manually navigating to a webpage containing a system-supplied identification number.
A committee of Tuck faculty and staff examined the situation last week after Harvard announced that it would be automatically rejecting all applicants who had been found guilty of hacking into the website. Danos said he considered the committee's deliberations in arriving at the final decision.
"We concluded that the actions did not reach the level that would necessarily bar a person from being a valued member of the Tuck community," Danos said.
Guilty applicants will be given an opportunity to explain their actions in statements supplementing their application, and each case will still be considered individually with the applicant's actions and explanation considered as important factor. If a guilty applicant does receive admission, he will be monitored and counseled while enrolled. Applicants who were not admitted will still be allowed to re-apply in the future.
The decision sharply contrasted with Harvard's decision to automatically reject the 119 applicants to its business school who had accessed its website early. MIT's Sloan School of Management and Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business followed suit with similar decisions. Stanford, on the other hand, chose a course of action similar to that announced by Danos, calling on applicants who exploited the software loophole to come forward and explain their actions.
Harvard Business School Dean Kim Clark called the applicants' actions "a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization," especially at a time when a myriad of corporate scandals have called the integrity of those at the top of the business world into question.
But others have accused Harvard of ethical grandstanding and maintain that automatic rejection is far too harsh for the crime committed.
"Trying to maintain proportionality between transgressions and consequences was a strong guiding principle," Danos said of Tuck's policy.
The controversy brings forward a question that is only beginning to be asked: whether someone who does something wrong while sitting in front of a computer should face the same consequences as someone who does something wrong in real life. For Harvard and the other schools that made similar decisions, the answer is an unambiguous yes.
"To us, an ethical breach is an ethical breach whether it happens digitally or in the real world," Clark told the New York Times.
An MIT Sloan School dean told the Washington Post that the applicants' actions were like breaking into an admissions office at night to see how his or her application fared.
Instructions for hacking into ApplyYourself were posted on a BusinessWeek message board in early March. Most business schools' decisions are scheduled to go out around March 30.
The poster, who called himself "brookbond" wrote, "I know everyone is getting more and more anxious to check status of their apps to [Harvard Business School]...so I looked around their site and found a way."
Some believe that the procedure doesn't even pass the bar for what would be considered "hacking" while others maintain that it would become evident to anyone going through the steps that they were doing something wrong.
But one of the business-savvy applicants who was rejected from Harvard has tried to create business success from educational and ethical failure. He is selling shirts featuring the slogan "Ethical, Shmethical: save the HBS 119."
