The good news: you've been admitted to Harvard; the bad news: because you hacked into the admissions site, we're reconsidering

Talk about brain-dead and poor judgment: more than 100 applicants to top U.S. business schools, including Harvard and Stanford, decided to end their uncertainty about whether or not they got in by hacking into an admissions website after an anonymous hacker last Wednesday posted instructions on how to do so on Business Week Online's technology forum.

I'd throw these jokers out: not because of their audacity and enterprising nature in doing what they did but, rather, because of their demonstration of breathtaking stupidity and lack of common sense.

I mean, who would want one of these fools running their company?

I'm reminded of the Phi Beta Kappa anesthesiology residents who, when they can't get a blood pressure, start rummaging around in the anesthesia machine drawers for another blood pressure cuff instead of reaching over and feeling to see if the patient has a pulse.

Idiots.

Here's Victoria Griffith's story about the Harvard hack, from today's Financial Times.

Harvard Hackers Must Await Their Fate

More than 100 applicants to top US business schools, including Harvard and Stanford, sought to end months of nail-biting over whether they would be admitted by hacking into MBA admissions sites.

But even the ones who got good news may be in for an unwanted surprise.

Harvard said it was reconsidering the status of the hackers who had initially been approved for admission.

The potential students who accessed the admissions site were only a small portion of the approximately 8,500 applicants to the MBA programme.

The university has obtained names of the offenders.

"It certainly casts their applications in a new light, although no final decisions will be made until March 30," said James Aisner, Harvard Business School spokesman.

"It is a serious breach of the system. One hacker would have been too many."

Applicants were tipped off by an anonymous hacker who posted instructions for getting into the site on Business Week Online's technology forum on Wednesday.

The admissions sites were open for more than nine hours before the schools' administration was alerted to the problem and the admissions letters were taken down.

Applicants could only access information on themselves.

MIT's Sloan School of Management and the business schools at Duke and Carnegie Mellon were also affected.

But Sloan and MIT said applicants would not have garnered any information from their sites, since no admissions decisions had yet been posted.

The security breach occurred because of a digital loophole at ApplyYourself, a company that runs the admissions systems for a number of universities.

Harvard posts preliminary decisions on its site, although they are not finalised until just before they are sent out.

For those hacking into the system, it is highly improbable the Noes will be turned into Yeses.