The Harvard Crimson has published an article on yesterday’s hacking incident. A few interesting details from the report:
1) The site was vulnerable for over nine hours yesterday before the admissions decision letters were taken down…
2) The CEO of ApplyYourself made a statement about how despite the loophole in the system, applicants could only see their own decision letter and not those of other candidates…
3) The article indicates that applicants may have used the same technique to enter other admissions sites at schools using the ApplyYourself software package (MIT/Sloan, Duke/Fuqua, Stanford GSB)…
Full text of the article: http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article506140.html
Beyond the immediate crisis, there are also issues to consider surrounding the various software vendors in the MBA admissions space (ApplyYourself, Embark/Princeton Review, Darden Solutions/Edulink, etc). One has to wonder what this high-profile glitch will do for ApplyYourself’s market share…
Also, for those of you who are interested in the systems decisions made by top schools, check out the following article that was published back in 2002 for the admissions community (written by Alex Brown, Todd Reale and other leading admissions officers): http://www.gmac.com/selections/spring2002/technology_decisions/page2.html
And, here’s a business case study on how Darden rolled out their in-house system to other schools (EDUlink): http://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/smithr/ASPEdulink.doc
