The B-school and HMS situations are totally different: (1) it was HMS own actions that made the financial aid website prematurely available to applicants, not the unauthorized actions of anyone else; (2) the HMS website wasnt hacked and no one who tried to get in had any reason to think it was; (3) applicants who were able to get into the HMS website were by definition not making an unauthorized entry but an entry that was authorized by HMS itself (how can an authorized entry be unethical?); (4) unlike a confidential admissions website, theres nothing wrong with trying to enter a financial aid website containing nonconfidential forms, especially since its customary to work on financial aid forms before acceptance to med school; (5) those who got into the site or failed trying, gained ambiguous info, at best, about their admissions status; (6) the access was only a few hours, not a month, before the decisions were scheduled to be mailed; (7) if HMS tried to say it was improper for applicants to type truthful login info and click submit, then its improper for all the applicants who did that, whether they got into the site or not so (after all, it was HMS system that then determined who succeeded in getting into the site), which would mean HMS would have to disqualify a major portion of interviewees; (8) HMS phone system says it mailed acceptances yesterday and theres no way that this situation could be grounds for rescinding an acceptance once issued; (9) once HMS chose to mail the acceptance letters after having already learned of this event (from SDN posters' calls first thing Monday morning), it lost any possible right to use this event as a reason not to accept a student; (10) there were so many possible "first week in March" dates mentioned for sending out the acceptances that it was reasonable for an applicant to assume that the status page and financial aid websites were updated by HMS on purpose over the weekend because the letters had already been mailed on Friday, March 4th (isn't it reasonable to assume HMS didn't make a mistake?); and (11) imagine what would happen if HMS tried to rescind acceptances from students who entered a website that HMS own computer program authorized them to.
