Here's How To See What College Admissions Officers Wrote About You

A group of Stanford students have found a way to crack open the secretive world of elite college admissions.

Beck Diefenbach / Reuters

A group of Stanford students have discovered a way to access their own confidential admissions files — including comments by admissions officers, criticisms of their applications, and information about how their status as minorities, athletes, or legacies affected their applications.

The staff of an anonymous Stanford publication called the Fountain Hopper is encouraging thousands of students at Stanford and other universities nationwide to request their own files, potentially cracking open the secretive and controversial world of elite colleges admissions.

It's a topic that has been hotly contested lately — a recent lawsuit filed against Harvard University alleges that the school discriminates against Asian applicants.

Their method is shockingly simple: requesting access under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which mandates that schools provide students access to their own educational records. Students frequently use FERPA to request everyday files like transcripts.

Almost nobody knows, however, that those records also include highly secretive admissions files. The publication sent out an email to Stanford students last night encouraging them to request their own admissions documents; they estimate that as many as 700 students have already filed their own requests, creating what could be a trove of data about how the country's most selective university selects its students.

Stanford did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BuzzFeed News.

Documents viewed by BuzzFeed News show that Stanford students were able to view the evaluative essays written about them by admissions officers and numerical valuations assigned to their personal qualities, as well as descriptions of interviews and recommendation letters. The documents are labeled "confidential." But under FERPA, they legally belong to students.

The Fountain Hopper's staff said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that they hope the documents shed light on Stanford's process. "We think that admission to a University such as Stanford is a process that is biased towards those that are in the know," they wrote in an email. "Everyone has a right to know what goes on in the black box."

Just five percent of almost 40,000 students were admitted to Stanford in 2014, the lowest admissions rate of any university in the country.

via IFTTT