August 19, 2008
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
Posted on Tuesday August 19, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: More Math Homework Does Not Help Average Achievers Increase Test Scores
Next: Web Royalty Fees Could Close Pandora's Box
Can anyone say “Class Action.”
— AC Aug 19, 04:50 PM #
Embarrassing, sure, but give me a break: those were PRACTICE test scores, not official test scores. ETS and other organizations have done far worse.
— Bemused Aug 19, 05:08 PM #
You know for a fact that they were pracice test scores? Sounds to me like they were real FCAT scores.
Also, were they practice birthdates, pracice learning disabiliies, pracice ethnicities, etc.?
— Not Amused Aug 19, 08:10 PM #
I don’t know about you, but one of the minor irritating things about this article is that the statement from the Princeton Review says the “data was [sic] …”. They meant to say that the data were not widely available.
— nuevo mexicano Aug 20, 10:49 AM #
“Data” started out as the plural of “datum” and can still be used that way, but it’s also perfectly standard to use “data” as a singular noun, a synonym for “information.” This is similar to “agenda,” the plural of “agendum,” now used to mean the list of items and considered a singular noun by everyone.
My guess, they said “the data was” because they damn well meant “the data was,” and my personal opinion as an editor is that to pretend otherwise is to pointlessly engage in sterile pedantry, like worrying about split infinitives.
Seven weeks they left that information out there? Good Lord.
— Dan Aug 20, 11:22 AM #
No surprise. This is simply yet another in a long string of what can only be said to be terrible data management and use practices by PR. Their survey would never pass even the least demanding standards of survey design. Their opt-in, come to our website and tell us about your college, approach is a sampling method well-known to produce anything but representative samples. What they do then with the data (plural), the “scales” they develop (“Colleges that Ignore God the Most;” “Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians”) are made to be catchy to students, but are anything but reliable measures. There was the year they posted a lot of botched data from the CDS, e.g., on class size distribution. On and on. These guys and data just do not mix.
— David Davis-Van Atta Aug 20, 03:54 PM #