The headline in Friday's Post-Gazette, "Business School Rejection Unfair to Hackers?" read like a question in a Monty Python skit. How can any graduate business school that values its reputation be unfair to someone caught hacking, the cyber equivalent of breaking and entering?

On March 2, about 150 students tried to access data during a nine-hour window of vulnerability in a computer system that managed the information for six schools. Although the data that the intruders wanted hadn't been posted in some cases, their security breaches left a trail of cyber footprints.

The decisions by Carnegie Mellon, Harvard and Duke universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to bar grad school applicants who tried to sneak a peek have fueled curious discussions about the nature of cheating. Some of the applicants who could be denied admission want to parse the very definition of the offense.

Admittedly, there may be varying degrees of offense. What about the students who were trolling the Internet when information on how to check their admission status fell into their laps? Should they be punished like the hackers on the front lines who exploited weaknesses in a computer system and posted data in cyberspace? Are there degrees of culpability that a university must consider?

Hacking is a harsh-sounding word, and for good reason: Anyone who "hacks" is often engaged in something ethically, and often legally, questionable. Those who passively receive stolen information from hackers are "fences" for data they shouldn't have.

In a culture too familiar with white-collar crime, it's imperative to raise the ethics of people in business. A good place to start is holding prospective business students, like those caught hacking, to rigorous ethical standards.

The straight-shooting words of Mike Laffin, spokesman for Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, said it all: "The students were accessing information that they did not have permission to see, and we consider that an ethical breach." What part of that is so hard to understand?