Saturday, December 02, 2017

Stanford’s elite business school caught cheating — by one of its own MBA students .

The San Jose Mercury News reports:
Half the students at Stanford University’s elite, $70,000-per-year business school receive fellowship grants. For years, the school has made it clear that the money goes to those who might otherwise be unable to attend, or who might be forced — against school recommendations — to work part-time during the Master of Business Administration program.

”All fellowships are need-based,” says promotional material from the Graduate School of Business. “It’s important to understand that we do not negotiate fellowship amounts or eligibility.”

But now, thanks to a huge breach of students’ personal financial data, the school has been caught cheating — by one of its own.

In February, MBA student Adam Allcock discovered 14 terabytes of confidential student data from financial aid applications, according to a new report. Later that month, Allcock reported the breach to the school’s financial aid director, and the records were removed within an hour, the report said.

However, Allcock had dug deeply into the data, spending 1,500 hours analyzing the information and putting together an 88-page report, according to Poets&Quants, a website covering business school news.

Allcock’s conclusion? The Graduate School of Business had not been honest with students, in fact had been “lying to their faces” for more than a decade.

Rather than being solely need-based, the fellowship grants were used to rank students according to their value to the school, Allcock determined.
Mistakes were made.