Patience is a virtue, and impatience — as some Graduate School of Business applicants learned the hard way — can override one’s dreams of a Stanford Masters of Business Administration.

On Thursday, Business School Dean Robert Joss announced that none of the 41 applicants who hacked into the system to sneak an early peek at their admission status would be admitted.

On March 2, someone with the username “brookbond” hacked into ApplyYourself, Inc.’s application software to view admission decisions and posted instructions on the Business Week online forum showing others could to do the same.

In the nine hours before the problem was patched, 150 students attempted to view their admission status for the business schools at Stanford, Harvard, Duke, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The ruse turned out to be a twofold mistake for the applicants. Most of the decisions had not yet been posted, and worse yet, ApplyYourself technicians quickly exposed the names of the hackers to the universities. But unlike Harvard and Carnegie Mellon — who immediately denied admission to all offenders — Stanford did not reject the guilty applicants outright.

Instead, as Business School Admissions Director Derrick Bolton told The Daily in a March 8 article, “Stanford reaches admission decisions individually and will not make a collective judgment on individual applications.”

The decisions for this year’s admission process were released on Thursday and all 41 Stanford applicants who reportedly hacked were denied admission.

“We asked each applicant who had breached the ApplyYourself software to contact us with an explanation,” Joss said in a statement on the Business School’s Web site. “None of those who gained unauthorized access was able to explain his or her actions to our satisfaction.”

Joss added that he hopes the applicants involved “might learn from their experience.”

Sanford Kreisberg, an independent admissions consultant for students applying to elite business schools, served as an advisor for many of the offenders — including about 50 of the 119 Harvard hackers — after ApplyYourself released their names.

“I give Stanford a lot of credit for the way they handled this,” Kreisberg said in an interview with The Daily. “They treated it with due process and respect for the applicants, and they treated it as a learning process.”

In contrast, Kreisberg said he deplored Harvard’s treatment of the situation, calling it “grandstanding and demonizing.”

“Business schools have a problem with ethics,” he said, adding that the outright rejection of some students may have been a way for MBA programs to save face in the wake of “gigantic waves of ethical scandals,” such as the Enron debacle, that have shaken the business world in recent years.

Stanford business student Ian Hill agreed that Harvard’s approach was unwarranted, considering how simple he believes the “hacking” instructions to have been.

“I don’t think that billing it as ‘hacking’ is acceptable because all you had to do is delete part of the URL to get access to the admissions site,” Hill said. If accessing the information was more difficult, Hill said he believes many of the students would have more readily taken a moment to reflect on what they were doing.

He added that he could see himself “in the moment and in the excitement” neglecting to consider whether such an easy act was unethical, and thinking, “well, what does it technically matter if I found out a bit early?”