An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes

An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes: "Instances have also been uncovered at Stanford, MIT, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, and possibly others. Using instructions posted by anonymous users on several Internet B-School bulletin boards, including at BusinessWeek Online, many of the hackers were able to discover their acceptance status weeks before decision letters were sent." The following are the excerpts from a very interesting news which has just come in. "ApplyYourself, Inc.", Web site had some bug which when exploited, allowed students to get a peek inside the university internal documents detailing about the application Acceptance/Rejection status. The B-Schools have hit back rejecting the applicants who tried to find out their app status. Harverd Dean Kim B. Clark says, "This behavior is unethical at best--a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization."; he continues "..Our mission is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world .." and "..Those who have hacked into this Web site have failed to pass that (integrity) test..". Pretty sad for those candidates. I think the Harvard line is so typical OLD SCHOOL Dogamtist approach. A much more balanced line is taken by Kellog who say that they will evaluate each applicant found guilty of this breach on a case by case basis "In the best case, what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; in the worst case, a lack of integrity". The counter argument would be something like "Ethics" is something than cannot and should not be compromised on. The worlds future leaders should not be the ones who digressed the line of righteousness , sometimes out of only greed and being unable to control the temptation. Well, two sides of the story, quite an involved one at that actually. The better part of the Harvard 'punishment' is that they would not share the list of students who have been rejected for this purpose with other B-Schools.
~ Chirantan