Yale University has acknowledged that its law school responded to a wave of student requests for their application evaluations by discarding all such records — an action that has prompted an advocacy group to warn colleges not to destroy potential evidence in admissions lawsuits.
Yale Law School's destruction of the records, first publicized by one of its own students on Sunday in a column for The New Republic, occurred after several students submitted requests for copies of their application evaluations under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or Ferpa.
In a statement that Yale sent to The Chronicle on Thursday, Asha Rangappa, the law school's dean of admissions, said it had routinely discarded such information at the end of every admissions cycle until 2001 — when its admissions process became fully electronic — and had decided to revert to the old practice in response to the new records requests.
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/students-requests-for-own-admissions-records-prompt-colleges-to-purge-documents/95831