CASE : Hackers

Many universities today assign internet accounts to applicants who have applied to
the school for admission as a student. The internet account allows the applicant to log
into a web site and check their admissions file. This month, someone on a generic
and public online forum posted a simple procedure that would allow students to
discover the fate of their applications such as whether or not they were accepted.
Basically, once you logged in, you could add a slash and key words to the web
address and view the scoring of your application and whether it was accepted or
denied. And this can be done before the school formally sent the decision letter to the
student.
As it turned out, many who tried this trick simply saw blank pages, but the schools
could tell which students had made the attempts. Shortly afterward, several schools,
including Harvard, announced that any student who had tried to check their status in
this way would be automatically denied admission. Dean Kim Clark of Harvard,
called the students’ behavior “unethical at best – a serious breach of trust that cannot
be countered by rationalization.”


Please comment. For example, one could not call this a major “hack.” In fact, it is
hard to imagine human (or student) nature from passing up an opportunity to know
whether they were accepted or not before a letter comes in the mail. Nor does
knowing affect their application and the decision-making process that had already
been completed. Therefore, does the degree of “hacking” change the behavior from
unethical to ethical? Furthermore, one could hardly call universities the bastion of
ethical behavior. Being the political institutions that they are, can they really demand
such sinless perfection from those who wish to attend? Or are their actions correct
and appropriate for the transgression? If not, is there another way? Could another
answer be found between punishment and forgiveness that would create a win-win?