when 211 applicants to a half-dozen top business schools followed instructions posted on a Business Week bulletin board to sneak a peek at their admission status online, it drew comparisons to breaches of business ethics at Enron and WorldCom and touched off a nationwide debate about what constitutes hacking.

On March 2, an individual signed on as “brookbond” set out instructions for applicants to check their admissions status on ApplyYourself, an online application service used by many business schools. Users had to log in with their username and password, view the source code of a web page, and paste a number found there onto another URL. They could then see their “decision status pages,” and in some cases gain advance information about whether they had been admitted.

Forty-one individuals attempted to gain access to decision status pages for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, but could not, because the school did not post its decisions until March 31.

Several business schools, including those at Harvard and MIT, denied admission to all who attempted to learn their fate. Stanford asked applicants to submit an explanation, then evaluated each on an individual basis. Ultimately, none of the 41 who attempted to access the system was admitted.

“Given the implications for each applicant, we felt that a fair process was as important as a just outcome,” said Dean Robert Joss in an April 1 statement. “Not all of the candidates in question were otherwise competitive for admission. Of the competitive applicants, none of those who gained unauthorized access was able to explain his/her actions to our satisfaction.

“We consistently have expressed dismay at the actions of any individual who sought to gain unauthorized access,” continued Joss, MBA ’67, PhD ’70. “By carefully reviewing the file of each applicant involved in these incidents, we upheld the Business School’s values while treating each applicant fairly. As an educational institution, we hope that the applicants involved in this incident might learn from their experience.”