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It sounds rather conspiracy-ish, but it is absolutely true.

I made a broad FERPA student-records request. One of the entries in my career services log indicates that I post on TLS with some frequency as "[redacted]." They certainly don't know this information from me, and the person who made the entry is someone I've never talked to or met.

This is at a T14 school, and I'm posting anon because even though my school will know I'm the one making this statement (there aren't a lot of FERPA requests being made), I don't want them to know the name I'm posting under now.

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Tempted to run a FERPA request just to see what notes they've been taking on me.

How would they know this?

do you guys care?

Kronk wrote:do you guys care?

wouldn't this be good, if anything? now they have an incentive to make sure you get a good employment outcome so you don't smear or badly represent your school?

..

Kronk wrote:do you guys care?

Given that I'm pretty much exactly the same in real life as I am on here, nope. And I also know for a fact that at the very least admissions knows my TLS name. They cracked the code before I was even admitted.

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If you were posting in school specific threads I could see how that would be an easy connection to make and I could also see why OCS and admissions would want to monitor those threads (see what student's perceptions are of the school and what they tell other people about the school). Short of that though I'd think they'd have to have someone fairly actively reading TLS to figure that out.

sublime wrote:

mvp99 wrote:How would they know this?

If you were active during your admissions cycle, and posting in your school's thread, you probably put enough info for them to match it up with your app, which basically has your entire life in it. Stats + timing + location is pretty easily enough.

I've heard former admissions counselors say it's ridiculously easy to match TLS account to an applicant, but they generally don't care. They usually just see what's being said about the school and if the person is someone who would attend their school: paraphrasing Spivey here.

Dear schools I applied to,

I love you and keep up the great work!

DELG wrote:

Kronk wrote:do you guys care?

wouldn't this be good, if anything? now they have an incentive to make sure you get a good employment outcome so you don't smear or badly represent your school?

It's a little troubling that they have people actively monitoring forums and looking to connect students with their user names, especially when there seems to be very little individualized effort to help those same students find jobs.

Also, under FERPA, personally identifying information is only supposed to be shared with faculty/administrators/staff who have a legitimate educational interest in that information. I'm not sure that my user name is of legitimate [educational] interest—however broadly you choose to construe that term—to your average OCS employee.

Anonymous User wrote:

DELG wrote:

Kronk wrote:do you guys care?

wouldn't this be good, if anything? now they have an incentive to make sure you get a good employment outcome so you don't smear or badly represent your school?

It's a little troubling that they have people actively monitoring forums and looking to connect students with their user names, especially when there seems to be very little individualized effort to help those same students find jobs.

Also, under FERPA, personally identifying information is only supposed to be shared with faculty/administrators/staff who have a legitimate educational interest in that information. I'm not sure that my user name is of legitimate [educational] interest—however broadly you choose to construe that term—to your average OCS employee.

"information that an official obtained through personal knowledge or observation, or has heard orally from others, is not protected under FERPA."

http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco ... dents.html

Your interpretation of that would subsume the entire rule. If they record a TLS name for purposes of tracking you, even if they originally learned the name casually, they for sure have created a ferpa protected record.

lacrossebrother wrote:Your interpretation of that would subsume the entire rule. If they record a TLS name for purposes of tracking you, even if they originally learned the name casually, they for sure have created a ferpa protected record.

No.

weird, that took two seconds:

FERPA generally prohibits the improper disclosure of personally identifiable information derived from education records. Thus, information that an official obtained through personal knowledge or observation, or has heard orally from others, is not protected under FERPA. This remains applicable even if education records exist which contain that information, unless the official had an official role in making a determination that generated a protected education record.

How is an observation readily accessible to the public at large a "determination"

1. official identifies you on TLS.
2. official decides to record this information (hence, the presence of this in OP's report)
3. official may not discuss this with general staff.

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alternative:

1. OCS finds your TLS username
2. OCS records this in some informal db that's not part of your record
3. ocs not bound by ferpa
4. this doesn't come up in ferpa request.

sublime wrote:I know my admissions definitely knows my TLS name. Wouldn't surprise me if CSO did as well.

+1

sublime wrote:

mvp99 wrote:How would they know this?

If you were active during your admissions cycle, and posting in your school's thread, you probably put enough info for them to match it up with your app, which basically has your entire life in it. Stats + timing + location is pretty easily enough.

I thought everyone fudged their stats exactly for this reason.

Also I don't really see how OCS knowing my user would affect me either way, but I will say I'm positive admissions knowing me helped me for both getting in in the first wave and my scholly.

My adcomms are prolly glad I stopped telling most people not to come to my school

Very few career services people ever come on TLS, many don't even know of its existence.

AdComms browsing TLS is much more come than career officers.

I doubt most CSOs would care enough to do anything anyways. I log onto TLS from my computer at work. I don't care. As long as you aren't a total clown on the site, it won't matter.