Professional and Business Ethics

Professional and Business Ethics
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Professional and Business Ethics
Hacking into Harvard
Harvard Business School (HBS) rejects applications from students who allegedly hacked into the admissions site (Shaw, 2011). The students accessed the site to find out whether their applications were successful. HBS has a third party site called ApplyYourself that enables interactions between them and the applicants. The applicants were to know their status of applications on March 30. Someone discovered that a week earlier that some of the applicants’ admission and rejection letters were available on the website, ApplyYourself.
The applicant could access their letters by creating a special URL. There were no hyperlinks in the website. The instructions for creating a special URL was available on an online forum that the HBS applicants frequented. Applicants could see either a blank page or a reject letter. The blank page applicants had presumption that HBS was to admit the student or the decisions to admit were pending. 119 Harvard Business School applicants used the instructions and this led to their rejection of their application calling it a breaking of ethics. The reaction of the students to the rejection of application is unknown (Simpson, 2012).
Several debates on the issue set off for several weeks with T-shirts with words, “Save the Harvard 119” sold (Shaw, 2011). Some people saw the move by HBS as an insensitive because the software was faulty and lacked security while others thought the school, especially, the dean Clark response shows the attributes of a role model in ethics. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business one of the B-schools followed the HBS lead.
The issue of HBS is surprising because the staff took a lengthy period to inform the applicants on their status of admission to school. Those rejected applicants needed to know the reason as soon as possible so that they could take another course of action. Harvard had taken time to inform all applicants on the website, ApplyYourself, and not the individuals. There is no valid reason for HBS not to disclose the information to the applicants. It was unfair that the individuals were able to see their rejected letters without a password.
The anxiety of waiting to join a prestigious business school like Harvard would make the applicants curious to know if they qualified. This is what mandated them to access the site by following instructions to create a URL, which was a better way than waiting indefinitely for the answers (Simpson, 2012). The applicants were not aware that they were hacking the website; they would have restrained themselves from accessing the site. HBS could have communicated as soon as possible to avoid a problem of students of looking for ways to hack to the website.
In the case study hacking in Harvard lacks deontology ethics. The moral outcome in the case did not look at the wrongness or rightness, but at its moral importance. Hacking in Harvard adopts utilitarianism in that the students acted out of their self-interests.
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