MBA applicants Case Study

During nine hours that it took the business schools to fix their security problems, around two hundred students got curious and checked the results of their applications. Those students were subsequently rejected the admissions to the schools they applied for. The decision Newer based on prospective students’ actions being unethical. 1 . I would have taken an opportunity to learn my results sooner, if I have been one of the MBA applicants in the case, and I would have considered it to be a moral decision.

Businesslike Online, as far as I understood, was a reliable message board that thousands of students used.

If there were some instructions posted on the board, that the schools’ officials did not like or approve of, they (officials) should have posted a note to all the applicants on the same message board to not use the Instructions and stay away from trouble. It was not stated in the case that anything like that was done, so I assumed it was not. We could even assume that the officials did not take any measures on purpose to get rid of at least some pull of numerous applicants. Also, how weak the security systems of the nation’s most prestigious schools needed to be for regular (not IT) people to get in?

I would have made the decision to follow the instructions out of curiosity and desire to find out the results of my application sooner, rather than basing it on my moral principles.

2. From the point of view of egoism, the applicants’ actions were morally right. The applicants’ actions were solely based on their self-interest. Finding out about schools’ decisions sooner gave a piece of mind to those, who got in, and an opportunity to apply to different schools or make other plans to those, who did not get in. From the point of view of utilitarianism, the applicants’ actions were also morally right.

Utilitarianism asks us to assess, weather our actions would produce most happiness for everyone affected by our actions.

By checking the results of their applications, the applicants were not harming anyone. They were able to check only their own results, not someone else’s, and that brought them a piece of mind and a feeling that they could move on to some other tasks on their plates. The applicants’ actions were robbery morally right according to rule utilitarianism point of view as well. The rule utilitarianism promotes actions that maximize happiness for the society.

Knowing the results sooner wool d nave made all applicants nappy, it they nave checked t According to Kant, our actions are morally right if and only if we can will them as universal laws of conduct.

For this to have happened, the applicants should have acted out of their sense of duty. Since they were acting out of their self-interest, from the point of view of Cant’s ethics, their actions were not morally right. The applicants’ actions were probably not morally right according to Rose’s pluralism point of view as Nell.

Since checking the results of the applications was not a prima facie obligation, it Nas unfair to other students, who did not get into the database, and did not check their results. 3.

I think it was not wrong for the MBA applicants to take a pick at their application files, and what they did was morally permissible. As I mentioned in question#l , the instructions on how to check the results were posted on Businesslike Online for everybody to see. If the officials considered checking the results morally Impermissible, there should have been a note or some kind of warning posted. There definitely was a generation gap involved.

Anything that could be easily accessed online was considered legal and morally right, unless, of course, you were doing harm to somebody else.

The applicants’ actions did not harm anybody, the instructions to check the results were on broad view and easy enough for non- hackers to follow – and that was what they did. The applicants should probably have considered the fact, that the schools’ officials did not want the results revealed at that mime, but the anxiety to know if they got in was stronger, so the thought they might have been doing something wrong did not even cross the applicants’ mind at that time. . I think that Harvard and MIT overreacted.

As I saw it, by responding as they did those schools did not send a strong message about the importance of ethics, but rather the message that they could not teach the ethics to their prospective students. As R. Schmaltziness, the dean of Mitt’s Sloan School of Management, stated, by rejecting the ethically challenged they were “…

Attempting to produce people that En they go out into the world, they will behave ethically. ” Didn’t this statement mean that they were rejecting the applicants that would be challenging to work with?

It made MIT look incompetent in my eyes to teach ethics to those ethically Challenged. If I were a business-school admissions official, I would invite the accused applicants to explain themselves in writing (as Stanford did), not for the purpose of rejecting them later anyway, but rather to find out what were the reasons they got into the system. The tentative decisions on the applicants were already made, and heir getting into the system should not have changed those. 5.

I would put the applicants’ who snooped behavior into the category of bold and aggressive.

But isn’t it what they teach students in leadership classes? A good business leader should always come up with bold decisions. A good business leader should act fast, often intuitively, and take advantage of the weaknesses of his/her opponents. In this case, the lack of security experienced by Apply Yourself, Inc. Helped future business leaders grab an opportunity that came their way and act on t I would even consider the applicants that did not check their admission status unenthusiastic, inattentive or simple lazy or uninterested in their future.

The system should have definitely been more secure. If regular people were able to access their records by merely changing a couple of letters in the URL, a good hacker could probably have accessed any personal information of students and faculty with such a poor security system. 5. The student who said he used poor Judgment probably meant that what he did Nas a mistake. I do not think it is a matter of his ethics in general. We can compare D.

Bolt’s lapse of Judgment to making a mistake, and lack of integrity to being a matter of someone’s ethics in general.

People learn from their mistakes, ethical people learn from unethical decisions they made. The curious applicants were not necessarily unethical, they might have been too anxious about getting the results of their applications and did not stop to think of the consequences of their actions. That is Neat their written explanations could be used for – to see if their actions were Just bad one time Judgments or a pattern of behavior and, therefore, an ethical issue.