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August 19, 2008, 12:47 PM ET
Score Zero for Privacy: Princeton Review Reveals Student Test Results to the World
Updated at 6:30 p.m., August 19, 2008.
“Beat the test,” brags the Princeton Review on its home page. But this week tens of thousand of Florida students may instead want to beat — or at least slap— the Princeton Review, after the test-preparation company’s Web site revealed their names and their scores on tests such as the SAT and LSAT. The New York Times reported today that the firm accidentally published the names and scores online and left them up for anyone to see for seven weeks.
In the peer-pressured worlds of high school and college, scores on standardized tests are usually only revealed by high-performing students who want to brag — and who are then teased by their fellows anyway. Most students like to keep their test scores private, since it’s bad enough being compared with others on class rank, fashion sense, popularity, parents’ income, and any other measure one can imagine. Now as many as 34,000 teenagers may have their math and verbal scores left flapping in the breeze.
A glitch in configuring the Princeton Review Web site, the newspaper reported, allowed anyone “to type in a relatively simple Web address and have unfettered access to hundreds of files.” Apparently a rival test-prep company found the flaw while poking around Princeton Review’s site, looking for a competitive edge. That company told The New York Times, which told the Princeton Review, which cut off the access hole on Monday.
The company, in a statement given to The Chronicle, said that only sophisticated computer users could have accessed the records, and that “at this point it does not appear the data was ever widely available.”
The Risk Factor, a blog published by IEEE Spectrum, wonders “how much information was downloaded by the firm doing competitive analysis before it informed the Times about the security hole.” Several thousand students are probably wondering the same thing. —Josh Fischman
Categories: Security
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