The Dead Grandmother Effect

Earlier this year some would-be students followed the guidance of hackers who discovered a way to review their admittance decision to some 100+ colleges. Seems that many of the top schools, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT had outsourced their admissions web-apps to a third party who had a bug in their software; Run the appropriate script, and you could view if you had been accepted or denied (assuming they had made a decision about your file) before the formal announcement date.

Plenty of over-eager students took the bait and checked their admittance decisions through the back door. Now Stanford, Harvard, and MIT's B-Schools have all dumped these candidates from their applicant rosters. In this day and age of ethical violations and Sarbanes-Oxley, you think these applicants would know better. I don't even think this stunt shows technological prowess, rather instead just shows that they can follow directions on how to run web commands.

It really is a sad state of affairs when you have presumably top candidates for top schools utilizing unethical behavior to try to get an upper hand. When I was teaching, I occasionally had students hand me papers that were photocopies of their friend's homework submissions, with their name penciled in the corner. Do they really think I am that retarded or ambivalent? Why would I reward such behavior by allowing that to pass my desk unfettered? In those cases I would let them test my boundaries once by writing them a scathing message about how next time they would get a zero, and I usually knocked their grade down a notch or two. The next time, which only came up once or twice, it was referred to proper academic channels. Behavior like that is intolerable in students and criminal in business, so for their sake I treated it as such.

God that makes me sound like such a bastard who operates only by the book. I don't mind giving second chances and bending the rules now and then, but don't lie to me repeatedly. I get a laugh at students who tell me (true story) they lost their hearing and need to leave class, yet hear my dismissal of them perfectly fine, or the whole dead grandmother effect, but please, don't kill off your entire family for the benefit of a better grade in my class. After the first relative, I (and your family) don't have the patience for it.

The Dead Grandmother Effect

Earlier this year some would-be students followed the guidance of hackers who discovered a way to review their admittance decision to some 100+ colleges. Seems that many of the top schools, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT had outsourced their admissions web-apps to a third party who had a bug in their software; Run the appropriate script, and you could view if you had been accepted or denied (assuming they had made a decision about your file) before the formal announcement date.

Plenty of over-eager students took the bait and checked their admittance decisions through the back door. Now Stanford, Harvard, and MIT's B-Schools have all dumped these candidates from their applicant rosters. In this day and age of ethical violations and Sarbanes-Oxley, you think these applicants would know better. I don't even think this stunt shows technological prowess, rather instead just shows that they can follow directions on how to run web commands.

It really is a sad state of affairs when you have presumably top candidates for top schools utilizing unethical behavior to try to get an upper hand. When I was teaching, I occasionally had students hand me papers that were photocopies of their friend's homework submissions, with their name penciled in the corner. Do they really think I am that retarded or ambivalent? Why would I reward such behavior by allowing that to pass my desk unfettered? In those cases I would let them test my boundaries once by writing them a scathing message about how next time they would get a zero, and I usually knocked their grade down a notch or two. The next time, which only came up once or twice, it was referred to proper academic channels. Behavior like that is intolerable in students and criminal in business, so for their sake I treated it as such.

God that makes me sound like such a bastard who operates only by the book. I don't mind giving second chances and bending the rules now and then, but don't lie to me repeatedly. I get a laugh at students who tell me (true story) they lost their hearing and need to leave class, yet hear my dismissal of them perfectly fine, or the whole dead grandmother effect, but please, don't kill off your entire family for the benefit of a better grade in my class. After the first relative, I (and your family) don't have the patience for it.