Hamfisted!

What with me going on vacation next week, a regular 12 hour work day is insufficient to deal with the work that I have been inundated with. But I haven't been so busy as to be untouched by the controversy raging in the MBA applicant world.

I received an email from HBS the other day that shocked me to some extent and made me clutch my stomach and laugh aloud.

We understand that some users of ApplyYourself, the on-line application and decision notification system we employ, have inappropriately attempted to access decision information about their own applications before the specified notification date. We take this abuse of the ApplyYourself system very seriously. Such behavior is unethical and inconsistent with the behavior we expect from high-potential leaders we seek to admit to our program. We want to assure all applicants, however, that:

* HBS decision information housed within ApplyYourself is neither complete nor final until our application notification dates
* The application information that all applicants and recommenders submitted to us has been, and continues to be, secure

We appreciate your interest in Harvard Business School, and we want to underscore to all our applicants our commitment to make and communicate our admissions decisions in the most rigorous, fair, and secure fashion.

Sincerely,
Brit K. Dewey, Managing Director of MBA Admissions & Financial Aid
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Road
Dillon House
Boston, MA 02163

At that time I felt this was a small little storm in the tea cup, some software developers are going to get their fingers rapped and life will carry on as normal. Today I read an article on MSNBC that claims this storm has taken on hurricane proportions. HBS is taking this as a personal affront, and reacting to it by puffing out their chests and closing all orifices while blowing themselves with air. (For some reason tweety comes to mind.)

To add to the confusion there is a major thread on BW where every Tom, Dick and Harry are opinioning themselves to death. They have divided themselves into two camps. The first who belong to the "You snooze, you lose" cadre, consisting of people who jumped on the bandwagon to get a little advance intimation of their results and are now being castigated as people of low moral values by the other camp consisting of the "snoozers" who are thanking their lucky stars that they had better things to do than read BW forums and by virtue of inaction have the moral upperhand.

Coming from an engineering background I seem to agree with PowerYogi's argument, that the HBS admissions committee seems to be laboring under a serious misunderstanding. Accessing information in public domain is NOT hacking. Besides I can understand the concerns of people who wanted to check their application to ensure that their data is not accessible by others. Having given all kinds of personal information to ApplyYourself, including credit card numbers, it is natural to want to ensure that your information is safe. (Regardless of HBS grandiose claims about the security of the system. Since we have already established that they know nothing of technology, so their claims have very low credibility.)

I feel sorry for the admissions committee at HBS, who is probably kicking themselves in the butt for over reacting to the problem. Instead of handling the situation in their usual blackbox fashion, they have made an ass out of themselves by putting their foot in their mouths. They are going to be held up to ridicule for a long time, specially if they employ any ham fisted method to deal with the perpetuators. I feel even worse for the poor applicants who now have to deal with three additional weeks of terror while the HBS adcom comes up with their punishment.

That being said, I would like some professors to take this up in their ethics and leadership class.