College Board, which runs SAT, AP exams, fined $730K by NYS for selling student data
The College Board will have to pay a $750,000 settlement with the New York Attorney General's Office, which said the organization unlawfully shared students' personal data with organizations such as colleges and scholarship programs.
Attorney General Letitia James' office said Tuesday that the College Board, a nonprofit that administers the PSAT, SAT and AP tests, shared the data of 237,000 New York students in 2019.
"Students have more than enough to be stressed about when they take college entrance exams, and shouldn’t have to worry about their personal information being bought and sold," James said in a statement.
In addition to the fine, the College Board "will be prohibited from monetizing New York students’ data that it acquires through its contracts with New York schools and school districts," the statement said.
The College Board also cannot ask students, while they are taking the exams, to choose to participate in programs that would share their data with other groups.
The $750,000 the College Board must pay includes the profit College Board made from sharing the data, penalties and costs to the state.
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According to the College Board's website, registration for the SAT is $60. Over 1.9 million high school students in the class of 2023 took the SAT at least once. Another 1.2 million students in the U.S. took over 4 million AP exams, which each cost $97.
The $750,000 penalty equals revenues from about 12,500 SAT tests or 7,700 AP exams.
Licensing student data
In 2010, the College Board started contracting with school districts in New York so that districts would cover the cost of the PSAT and SAT exams and let students take them during the school day. New York City, which has over 500 high schools, was among the districts that had a contract with College Board, the statement said.
Schools across the state have contracts with College Board to offer AP courses and their accompanying tests, which can count toward college credit.
The Attorney General's investigation found that before June 2022, the College Board gathered information from students when they took the PSAT, SAT and AP exams, such as their interest in attending a college with a religious affiliation, parents' income levels and their grade point averages.
Providing that information was optional but students were encouraged to sign up for the opportunity to be connected to more scholarships and colleges, the statement said.
Between 2018 and 2022, the College Board licensed that data to over 1,000 institutions and "received significant revenue" from doing so, according to the statement.
The College Board also used that data to send its own marketing materials to students until the fall of 2022. And until 2023, students were asked to opt in to the College Board's marketing materials when they registered for the AP program, the statement said.
Contact Diana Dombrowski at ddombrowski@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @domdomdiana.
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: College Board fined for selling student data on GPA, parents' income
