Reference no: EM131902787

Assignment

This assignment will give you the opportunity to choose a case study, and then write about the ethical implications and the impact of the events that are described. Each case study includes a set of questions that you should answer. You can choose any Case Study.

You will be graded on the following criteria:

Write a four to six page paper in which you:

Analyze the questions associated with your chosen case study and discuss them using concepts you learned in this course.

Explain your rationale for each of your answers to your chosen case study.

Format your assignment according to the following formatting requirements:

Typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.

Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student's name, the professor's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.

Cite your textbook as a reference.

Include a reference page. Citations and references must follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

Determine the considerations for and process of ethical business decision making to balance corporate and social responsibilities and address moral, economic, and legal concerns.

Analyze selected business situations using the predominant ethical theories, such as utilitarian, Kantian, and virtue ethics to guide ethical business decision making.

Determine the implications and impact of various civil liberty laws in the workplace, such as hiring, promotion, discipline, discharge, and wage discrimination.

Use technology and information resources to research issues in business ethics.

Write clearly and concisely about business ethics using proper writing mechanics.

Hacking into Harvard everyone WHo Has ever appLied for admission to a selective college or who has been interviewed for a highly desired job knows the feeling of waiting impatiently to learn the result of one's application. So it's not hard to identify with those applicants to some of the nation's most prestigious MBA programs who thought they had a chance to get an early glimpse at whether their ambition was to be ful lled. While visiting a Businessweek Online message board, they found instructions, posted by an anonymous hacker, explaining how to nd out what admission decision the business schools had made in their case. Doing so wasn't hard. The universities in question-Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Stanford-used the same application software one had to do was change the very end of the applicant- speci c URL to get to the supposedly restricted page contain- ing the verdict on one's application. In the nine hours it took Apply Yourself programmers to patch the security aw after it was posted, curiosity got the better of about two hundred applicants, who couldn't resist the temptation to discover whether they had been admitted.

Their MBA programs, it's a safe bet that few, if any, offending applicants were sitting in classrooms the following semester. Forty-two applicants attempted to learn their results early at Stanford, which took a different tack. It invited the accused hackers to explain themselves in writing. "In the best case, what has been demonstrated here is a lack of judgment; in the worst case, a lack of integrity," said Derrick Bolton, Stanford's director of MBA admissions. "One of the things we try to teach at business schools is making good decisions and taking responsibility for your actions." Six weeks later, however, the dean of Stanford Business School, Robert Joss, reported, "None of those who gained unauthorized access was able to explain his or her actions to our satisfaction." He added that he hoped the applicants "might learn from their experience."

Some of them got only blank screens. But others learned that they had been tentatively accepted or tentatively rejected. What they didn't count on, however, were two things: rst, that it wouldn't take the business schools long to learn what had happened and who had done it and, second, that the schools in question were going to be very unhappy about it. Harvard was perhaps the most outspoken. Kim B. Clark, dean of the business school, said, "This behavior is unethical at best-a serious breach of trust that cannot be countered by rationalization." In a similar vein, Steve Nelson, the executive director of Harvard's MBA program, stated, "Hacking into a system in this manner is unethical and also contrary to the behavior we expect of leaders we aspire to develop." claiming that Harvard and the other business schools had Given the public's concern over the wave of corporate scandals in recent years and its growing interest in corporate social responsibility, business writers and other media com- mentators warmly welcomed Harvard's decisive response. But soon there was some sniping at the decision by those.

It didn't take Harvard long to make up its mind what to do overreacted. Although 70 percent of Harvard's MBA students about it. It rejected all 119 applicants who had attempted to approved the decision, the undergraduate student newspaaccess the information. In an of cial statement, Dean Clark wrote that the mission of the Harvard Business School "is to educate principled leaders who make a difference in the world. To achieve that, a person must have many skills and qualities, including the highest standards of integrity, sound judgment and a strong moral compass-an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. Those who have hacked into this web site have failed to pass that test." Carnegie Mellon and MIT quickly followed suit. By rejecting the ethically chal- lenged, said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, the schools are trying to "send a message to society as a whole that we are attempting to produce people that when they go out into the world, they will behave ethically."

Duke and Dartmouth, where only a handful of students gained access to their les, said they would take a case-by- case approach and didn't publicly announce their individual- ized determinations. But, given the competition for places in per, The Crimson, was skeptical. "HBS [Harvard Business School] has scored a media victory with its hard-line stance," it said in an editorial. "Americans have been looking for a sign from the business community, particularly its leading educa- tional institutions, that business ethics are a priority. HBS's false bravado has given them one, leaving 119 victims in angry hands."

As some critics pointed out, Harvard's stance overlooked the possibility that the hacker might have been a spouse or a parent who had access to the applicant's password and per- sonal identi cation number. In fact, one applicant said that this had happened to him. His wife found the instructions at Businessweek Online and tried to check on the success of his application. "I'm really distraught over this," he said. "My wife is tearing her hair out." To this, Harvard's Dean Clark responds, "We expect applicants to be personally responsible for the access to the website, and for the identi cation and passwords they receive."

Dean Schmalensee of MIT, however, defends Harvard and MIT's automatically rejecting everyone who peeked "because it wasn't an impulsive mistake." "The instructions are reason- ably elaborate," he said. "You didn't need a degree in compu- ter science, but this clearly involved effort. You couldn't do this casually without knowing that you were doing something wrong. We've always taken ethics seriously, and this is a seri- ous matter." To those applicants who say that they didn't do any harm, Schmalensee replies, "Is there nothing wrong with going through les just because you can?"

To him and others, seeking unauthorized access to restricted pages is as wrong as snooping through your boss's desk to see whether you've been recommended for a raise. Some commentators, however, suggest there.

6. One of the applicants admits that he used poor judg- ment but believes that his ethics should not be ques- tioned. What do you think he means? If he exercised poor judgment on a question of right and wrong, isn't that a matter of his ethics? Stanford's Derrick Bolton distinguishes between a lapse of judgment and a lack of integrity. What do you see as the difference? Based on this episode, what, if anything, can we say about the ethics and the character of the curious applicants?