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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 15 2018, @12:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-getting-to-know-you dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Students are suing a major college admissions test maker for allegedly selling information about their disability statuses with universities, which they say could hurt their chances at getting into schools and impact the rest of their lives.

When students register to take the ACT—a standardized test used for college admissions taken by more than a million high schoolers each year—they answer a barrage of personal questions. As part of this, they are asked to note if they have disabilities that require "special provisions from the educational institution."

The ACT, which is administered by ACT, Inc., is the only real competitor to the College Board's SAT exam. The lawsuit claims that the ACT is selling the data it gleans from those student questionnaires—connected directly to students' individual identities—to colleges, which then use it to make important decisions about admissions and financial aid.

"A lot of students and parents have no idea how these testing agencies, which are gatekeepers to college, are using very sensitive and confidential data in the college admissions process," Jesse Creed, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, told me in a phone call. "[Colleges are] hungry for disability data, because they have limited resources, and it's expensive to educate people with disabilities."

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pbep/lawsuit-claims-the-act-sells-students-disability-data-to-colleges


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 15 2018, @05:42PM (#721861)

    The overwhelming determinant of student success is their family's level of achievement or motivation. You would have to provide a stable family where education and behaving properly are valued and reinforced by the parents. You don't have to be rich to have this, but you can't be really ghetto either.

    It's not money that makes for a good school. The city of Washington, DC spends more per pupil than its neighboring Northern Virginia suburbs. Care to guess which outperforms?

    People don't like to hear this because it makes it sound like nothing can be done by the school to fix the gap. Sadly, the gap has proved stubborn to fix. Have hope, but don't expect miracles. Slow improvement, not fast fixes.