UM to stop letting legislators know students’ GPAs

ORONO – For more than a decade “A” students at the University of Maine have received letters from their hometown legislators, praising their academic achievements.

But university officials took another look at their privacy policies this spring when students began to ask how their representatives knew their grade-point averages.

“We’re not sure of the origin of it,” said UM spokesman Joe Carr. “The practice of creating lists of students who have 4.0s and providing those lists to their legislators predates anyone who works here now. That’s more than 10 years.”

Carr said no students had ever asked how or why their GPAs had been released to their elected representatives. Officials at the Orono campus understand now that the tradition violates the university’s privacy policy and the disclosure provisions of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974.

“The fact of the matter is, we shouldn’t have done it,” Carr said. “The bottom line is we’re going to stop; we’re not going to do it anymore.”

The university’s public affairs office will continue to release Dean’s List rosters, according to Carr, as they do not include specific information protected by privacy laws. But his office won’t provide student grades or GPAs to anyone.

“We have spoken with our contacts in [the Office of] Student Records,” Carr said. “We told them we don’t want 4.0 lists anymore because we’re not going to do anything with them.”

Academic records, grades and GPAs are not classified as public information, and according to university policy and federal regulations, should not be available to the community at large. But campus agencies routinely share these private records with other campus departments when the information is needed to perform university functions.

“There was a misunderstanding about the appropriateness of providing information on 4.0 students,” said Peter Reid, associate director of student records. “We did indeed supply Public Affairs with that information. We won’t be doing that any more in the future.”

According to the current undergraduate catalog, there are instances when confidential student records, including grades and GPAs, are released to external organizations without student permission, such as to schools where University of Maine students seek admission, to employers and recruiters working with the campus Career Center and to representatives of student loan agencies.

But Reid, who first became aware of the practice of releasing student GPAs after a recent student inquiry, said none of these exceptions allows the disclosure of a student’s grade-point average to a state legislator. He declined to answer additional questions concerning changes in procedure in the Student Records office since the discovery of this violation.

Carr indicated there has been no broad policy change in the Student Records office, noting that requests from university departments for private student records will receive no greater scrutiny than in the past. But Carr acknowledged that Public Affairs will do better complying with current policy.

“This discussion has made us change one thing that we do,” Carr said. “There’s an outcome that can be part of the story.”