ACT and College Board Sued for Selling Student Information

This is one of the many reasons why parents need to pay attention to student privacy issues....  As far as I can tell, there has been no settlement or verdict yet. If you know of any updates, please comment below and leave a link.

ACT and College Board Sued for Selling Student Information 

 November 1, 2013 

 

A standardized test taker filed a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against ACT and the College Board for selling personal information about her and millions of American high schoolers.

The lawsuit, filed this week in a federal district court in Illinois, seeks more than $5 million in damages from the test makers for “unfair, immoral, unjust, oppressive and unscrupulous” conduct. Namely, the plaintiff, a Cook County woman about which little else is known, alleges that ACT and the College Board do not tell test takers what will be done with their personal information. She said test takers are asked if ACT and the College Board can "share" personal information with others. That is misleading, the lawsuit alleges, because the information is in fact sold and test takers -- almost entirely high school teens -- become part of a multimillion-dollar money-generating machine for ACT and the College Board.

The test makers have long sold high school students’ personal information to colleges that want to market to students. The current price is about 37 or 38 cents per name. Colleges are using increasingly sophisticated data mining techniques to recruit and shape their classes. Colleges can use such information to deny admission to students and perhaps reduce financial aid rewards.

Read more about data mining students here.