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【原文】 Hoping to demystify the collegeadmissions process, a group of Stanford frosh recently gained access tocomments on their Stanford applications under the federal Family EducationRights and Privacy Act (FERPA) due to a delay in destroying admissions-relatedrecords. The students found that admission officers ranked their applicationson a scale of one to five on various metrics, including test scores, highschool records, personal qualities and interviews.
Under FERPA, both current and former students have the right toreview their education records — including their college applications — within45 days of the date a request is made. The Fountain Hopper (FoHo) — a widelycirculated, anonymous student-run newsletter — made nationalheadlineswhen it publicized the FERPAprocess in Jan. 2015. The FoHo encouraged students to ask the University fortheir application files, including the written assessments and numerical scoresassigned to them by admission officers.
After being deluged with requests, the University began erasing records that include commentsfrom admission officers. The new norm is that these documents are typically“expunged once a student begins enrolled attendance,” wrote Universityspokesperson E.J. Miranda in an email to The Daily. However, sometimes there isa delay in this deletion process, allowing some students to continue to accesstheir records, Miranda added.
Haley O’Brien ’20 went to her FERPA appointment a few weeks agoafter hearing from several frosh who had seen their admission files, only to behanded a copy of her Common Application.
“I had nothing,” said O’Brien. “No notes. Literally nothing. I wasliterally there for two minutes because I had nothing to look at.” “You have a curiosity for why you’re here but it’s hard to realizeit’s on paper,” said Daily Staffer Alanna Flores ’22, who found it “super easy”to make a FERPA request after hearing from a friend who had accessed theirCommon Application file.
In order to view application comments in person, frosh have to goto the Student Services Center on the second floor of Tresidder Memorial Union.When Rachel Kim ’22 went to view her documents, a woman instructed her to turnoff her cell phone and reminded her that she had waived her FERPA rights to herletters of recommendation, she said. Kim reported receiving a file with someportions blacked out, which she surmised were her letters of recommendation.
“When you set an appointment you can choose how many minutes youwant it to be, and all my friends said 20 minutes was plenty of time,” Kim said. During Flores’ appointment, she was surprised to discover a pagetitled “Sibling Report.” “In my admissions file they actually compared me to my brother[who graduated from Stanford in 2016],” Flores said. “They put his high schoolreport in there with his GPA and a bunch of statistics about his high school.”
Daily staffer Evan Peng ’22 found the “reader notes” the mostinteresting part of his file, as well as the score designated for intellectualvitality. “I thought that was really funny because intellectual vitality isa meme on Stanford’s campus,” Peng said. Along with the summaries written by admission officers, multiplesources found that both legacy status and ethnicity are categorized intoabbreviations and numbers.
Kim, who identifies as Korean, noted her ethnicity was marked “2k,2” in her file. “I have another Asian friend who got a 2 for his ethnicity so wethink that 2 might be Asian but that’s just a guess,” said Kim, who thoughtthat equating race to a numerical category posed an “ethical issue.” In the interview report, Kim noticed she received a score of threeout of five for “character,” despite a positive write-up from her interviewer. “Kind of weird that my personality was given a number,” Kim said. Freshmen can view supposedly-deleted comments on their college applications --Stanford DailyLast year, an analysis of more than 160,000 student records found that Harvard consistently scored Asian-American applicantslower than others on personal ratings. The report was filed by a grouprepresenting Asian-Americans in a lawsuit against the university. Stanford,along with 15 other elite universities, filed an amicus brief in November acknowledging its practice of“race-conscious” admissions in order to create a diverse student body. However, Miranda contendedin his email to The Daily that the availability of viewing comments onadmissions records was “not related to the current case regarding Harvardadmissions.” Despite the questions Kim had about the meaning behind herethnicity score, she concluded that her admission file was not “asnumber-oriented as people make it sound.”
“My reader one wrote 3 paragraphs about me and I think that’s moresignificant than numbers,” she said. Flores, on the other hand, had mixed emotions after viewing heradmission file. She remembered shedding “a small, gentle tear” as she wasreading some of the comments made by the application reviewers and added thatshe had hesitations about recommending that other students make FERPA requests. “I came out of reading it actually really, like, distraughtbecause they were critical of a lot of things,” said Flores. “They kind of diginto your insecurities.” Beginning in 2015, students who submitted FERPA requests couldaccess their documents through NolijWeb, a third-party content managementsystem that the University has used since 2009 to host scanned files.
A databreach in NojiWeb that allowedstudents to view other students’ admissions files and sensitive personalinformation forced the University to suspend online access to FERPA documentsat the beginning of this month. Any student who requests their applicationmaterials must now make an in-person appointment to receive printed copies oftheir admissions documents, stored on NolijWeb.
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发表于 2019-2-25 22:13:45
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