Yale Law School deletes admissions data after numerous FERPA requests

This article was originally published in The Daily Pennsylvanian Steven Tydings on March 28, 2015

Yale Law School has deleted admissions evaluation data for enrolled students after a large uptick in FERPA requests.

Stanford students found out that they could access their own admissions files, causing a major increase in FERPA requests around the country, including at Penn. With requests coming in to Yale, the Law School decided to go back to an old policy of deleting numerical scoring data, as well as the identities attached with each score, after the annual admissions cycle.

“Recent FERPA requests prompted us to look at our record-keeping practices, and the decision was made to revert to our previous practice, which was to discard evaluation records after they had fulfilled their intended purpose,” Yale Law School Associate Dean Asha Rangappa said in an email in a Yale Daily News article.

According to the article, Yale only honored the first few FERPA requests before deleting the files without letting students know. Many students interviewed by the Yale Daily News were frustrated with the decision and found it irresponsible.

After the news broke that Yale Law School had deleted the files, the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions sent a letter to every Ivy League school (except for Harvard, which it is currently suing) requesting that it preserves its admissions files and restores any that have been deleted.

Read the Yale Daily News for more about Yale Law School and check out the Daily Princetonian for more about the letter. 

Read the original article here.