Late last month the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy issued a report on the security of state educational data warehouses, which are all the rage right now.

The idea is a good one: Create longitudinal databases containing all kinds of student information so researchers have a ready repository to support formative and summative evaluation, as well as policymaking.  I liked the idea so much that I drafted House Bill No. 3340 (2009), which passed the West Virginia Legislature during the 2009 regular session and mandates that public and higher education work together to develop shared educational data systems.

The Fordham study warns, however, that many states developing data warehouses do not have basic security systems needed to protect student privacy in place.  The study lists eight security “musts” for any educational data system.  Scarily, my former employer does not meet half of the security “musts,” which is not unusual, according to the report.

For anyone interested in a detailed FERPA tutorial, the first part of the report contains an excellent one – the best I’ve ever read.

The London Times ran an interesting article last week about new software for marking British students’ English papers.

In a test of the software’s effectiveness, it was given several of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and Anthony Burgess’s prose, to decipher.

Some of the more humorous conclusions:

• Churchill’s call to ‘fight them on the beaches’ was too repetitive, and he used ‘upon’ and ‘our’ too frequently.  His reference to the ‘might of the German army’ lost him points because the computer assumed he meant to use ‘might’ as a verb, not a noun.
• Hemingway needed to write with more care and detail and was rated below average.
• Burgess’ opening lines in “A Clockwork Orange” were incomprehensible.

Such software, of course, is all the rage in the United States.