Students Gain Access to Files on Admission to Stanford

[jacobolus]

> At least one student has received the records, and said he was surprised by what he got back: several hundred pages, including a log of every time his electronic identification card had been used to unlock a door,[...]

It seems totally unnecessary to indefinitely store every door swipe. Sure, store the swipes used to access the rare book room or the chemistry lab for 6 months or a year, but there’s no reason for every swipe into a dorm or dining hall to be permanently recorded. Some amount of time between a few days and a few weeks should be entirely sufficient for every reasonable purpose.

I imagine if the systems that store all the ID swipe data got hacked, it would be possible to learn all kinds of things about students, including embarrassing secrets or enough info about movement patterns to ambush someone.

[I guess this seems like a minor thing compared to records of people’s cell phone movements, internet traffic history, etc., but I think those should be deleted within a few days to a few weeks too.]

[clarkm]

This is one of the reasons that Richard Stallman refused to use his RFID card at MIT. If a door was locked, he would just tailgate someone in. Eventually CSAIL just gave him a key to a back door.

[Shivetya]

Look at it from this way, its probably more work to go back and delete entries that really don't take up much disk. Heck, collecting is easy, setting up periodic purges, archives, and such, usually gets pushed to another phase.... which may never come.

another side is, its both good and bad. You can see patterns and alert to changes. You could also use it to prove someone wasn't where others claim and so on. If your really creative you can mine it and try to figure out why so many students are making trips that take time and minimize it to put more time to learning than traveling. Like we route packages in shipping companies, load the truck properly for the route, get students into a route that minimizes travel from class to class

[rickdale]

When I was at college a friend of mine was being accused of a heinous crime. In the end, he used key card time slots to prove he was innocent. But even with the key card it was a matter of the incident happening like a single minute after he was there. Luckily, all of the key swipes were stored and it showed that shortly after he had already swiped his card etc. Anyways, long story short, it doesn't hurt to keep that kind of data especially on a college campus.

[clarkm]

The newsletter from The Fountain Hopper (who appears to have discovered this) has some more interesting details:

When you apply to Stanford, your application gets assigned at least two admissions 'readers.'

FoHo knows you get a third (specialized) reader if you're a legacy or a 'minority' (though we're not too sure how that's defined). We also think you get an additional reader if you're an athlete or development kid (i.e. you donated $$$).

These readers (a mix of full-time admissions officers and seasonal hires) are tasked with reading thousands of applications in just a few weeks and distilling each of them into an concise, 300-ish word summary.

http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c9d7a555374df02a66219b57...

[Alex3917]

> FoHo knows you get a third (specialized) reader if you're a legacy or a 'minority' (though we're not too sure how that's defined). We also think you get an additional reader if you're an athlete or development kid (i.e. you donated $$$).

This is how pretty much every major university does admissions, so not especially interesting. The one thing to note though is that athletes usually only get a boost if the coach actually goes to bat for them as part of the recruiting process, you're not going to get extra attention just because you played a sport.

[UnoriginalGuy]

I may be extremely naive but what does Stanford need the donations for? Aren't they rolling in dough.

[swatow]

I thought that affirmative action was a well established part of almost all university admissions. Seems disingenuous of them to put minority in scare quotes, when affirmative action is not something that universities are coy about talking about.

[stfu]

development kid (i.e. you donated $$$)

Anyone got any numbers on that? What does it take to become a development kid...

[ig1]

This is pretty much standard practice in Europe.

If you're storing/producing an information about an individual as an organization you have to operate on the assumption that the individual has a right to read it as in most cases they do.

[Symbiote]

The British implementation is called the Data Protection Act, which implements the EU Data Protection Directive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Act_1998

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive

Could Stanford just destroy these records after they've completed the admission process? Could a European university do that?

[dom96]

I currently attend a university in the UK and would like to request this information. But I'm not sure what the best way to do so is, who should I contact at my university (I presume the admissions department) and how should I request this information? Should I quote the Data Protection Act? Does anybody have experience doing this?

[wdaher]

MIT had the same problem in late 2003, and in the case of the college applications, solved the problem by simply destroying parts of the records when they were done with them.

(http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N53/53studrec.53n.html and http://tech.mit.edu/V124/N47/47e3.47n.html)

[qq66]

Which is how it should be. I can understand keeping a summary of the data to track the performance of your admissions process, but you shouldn't be keeping highly personal information about students for any longer than it takes to make the admissions decision.

[WBrentWilliams]

It would be interesting if a group of students applied for their applications en mass (say, the entire 2012 admitted class to a University in the US) and performed statistical analysis on the resulting data. I wonder if any great numbers of students would be willing to breach their privacy to allow such a study to be run.

[BorisMelnik]

Would like to see this too. I'm sure they could do this without breaching their privacy, maybe have one person validate the data, then redact name, social, and other identifiable information.

[rab_oof]

For grad school, working at the dept in which one would wish to enter is a popular, lower risk approach. The admissions for grad school tends to be either multi-tiered (uni & dept) or defers entirely to the department's admission folks. This tends to be one or two people for smaller programs. If they know you and you work in the same dept, you're probaly already friends by this time, so you'll at least have more intel on what's expected, if not some bias in your favor.

(Former Stanford affliate here. Ask me anything.)

[spiritplumber]

I tried the "rejection rejection letter" joke with Stanford after applying and being rejected (2009). I ended up working on a project with a Stanford prof for six months after that. It was fairly fun, and it let me decide that I didn't want to do grad school, so win-win there.

History is made by those who show up. If you're told to not bother showing up, SHOW UP ANYWAY!

I never had to escort a security person out of a building, either (although that happened at a Best Buy in 2006, but that's out of the scope of this article).

[eadler]

By any chance, was the Best Buy story related to http://improveverywhere.com/2006/04/23/best-buy/ ?

[pbhjpbhj]

Is there a legal conflict here - do writers of letters not have any protections under the law to prevent the letter being made public, or passed on to third parties. Do you lose all legal rights and controls over letters once you mail them?

The teachers maker recommendations clearly had an assumption of privacy in their communication?

If the Uni chose to precis the letter - eg provide a score in its place - would the right to view its content disappear. Is it just by virtue of it being attached directly to your internal academic record that one gets the ability to view it?

Interesting.

[zaroth]

"On the Common App used by most top colleges, applicants are asked to check a box waiving their right to ever see the recommendation letters written by their high school teachers and counselors. But students who did not check the box can get copies of those, too."

[jsprogrammer]

How do you have an assumption of privacy when you are the one mailing out the letter to some third party?

[WalterBright]

> “The things they write, it’s clear that they never expect them to be read,” said the Fountain Hopper staff member. “They’re very frank.”

I guess that'll now change. It'll become like what employers do when asked about a former employee's job performance - name, rank and serial number only.

The admissions committee may also become closed door meetings, with nobody allowed to take written notes or minutes. Verbal only.

[z2]

What is the purpose of keeping records in the first place? Is it to see if admissions criteria is a good indicator of student success? Otherwise could schools, which may already destroy records after a certain number of years [1], shorten that period, say, to the autumn following admissions season?

[1] Quick Google search shows USC keeping records for admitted students 5 years after last class taken: http://registrar.sc.edu/pdf/RecordsRetention2005.pdf

[driverdan]

> I guess that'll now change.

Why? So long as they don't do anything illegal in the selection process they shouldn't have to worry about anything. This is only for people who get accepted, not rejects.

[crm416]

I'm a little confused--the article mentions that letters of recommendation must be turned over, but I believe that's only the case if the writer explicitly waived confidentiality (see http://www.naceweb.org/public/ferpa0808.htm).

[davidrusu]

Looks like we've got something similar in Canada,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Information_Protection...

I'm excited to try it out at my university!

[001sky]

If/once these become public record, does that create any legal issues for the university? Given how easy it is to twist informal speech like an e-mail out of context it does make ya wonder. A boderline-defamatory remark made public seems quite different something kept private.

[wavefunction]

FERPA doesn't make them public records, it just allows a student to access their own educational records.

I think a student could release their own records but that wouldn't fall under defamation from what I know.

[jacalata]

Why does the article focus so heavily on Stanford? I understand that the students who have done this so far are there, but if this is based on a federal law that applies to all universities, shouldn't it work at all universities?

[gwern]

> I understand that the students who have done this so far are there,

That's it exactly. They've done the groundwork, laid out a template, recruited some students to request their records, and discussed a bit what they found or might found. So it's going to be Stanford-specific until similar meat is thrown out about other places.

[tux1968]

Why not ask students to only submit a 300 word-ish summary in the first place?

[gwern]

This sounds interesting. I just composed 3 based on the Fountain template and mailed them off (snailmail, since I don't still have access to any university help systems). Wonder what I'll get back?

[forrestthewoods]

Where is a link to actually read files? Reading NYTimes summary about said files is fine but I'd love to actually read them. It sounded like at least one student had made their files public? Maybe not.

[tarstarr]

Has anyone successfully gained access to their records? And has anyone posted them publicly? I'm interested in insights from this.

[fgblanch]

Any source about which federal law is? or if it does apply to other universities such as MIT or Harvrad?

[mrbabbage]

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, available at (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g)

[freditup]

You can read about the law here: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/students.html